The Skin of the Film Intercultura nterculturall Ci Ci n ema, Embod Emb odim ime ent, nt , and an d t h e Sense nses LAU LAURA U. MARKS ARKS DUKE DUK E UNIV UN IVER ERSI SITY TY PRES PRESS S
Durham and London
2000
© 2000 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ® Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Westm oreland Typeset in Melior with DIN Neuzeit Grotesk Bold Condensed display by Tseng Infor In format mation ion System Sys tems, s, Inc I nc.. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Title page art: Still from Sniff
Contents
List of illustr illu stratio ations ns vii Preface xi Acknowledgments
ixx
Introduction 1 1
The Memor Mem oryy of Images 24
2
The Memory Memo ry of Things JJ
3
The Memor Mem oryy of Touch Touc h 127
4
The Memor Mem oryy of the th e Senses Sen ses 19 1944
Conclusion: The Portable Sensoriu Sens orium m 243 Note No tess 249 Bibliography 259 Filmography/Videography Index 285
275
List of illustrations
1. Still from History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige 33 2. Archival photograph from Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet 35 3. Frame enlargement from Who Needs a Heart? 37 4. Frame enlargement from Calendar 38 5. Frame enlargement from Calendar 38
6. Frame enlargement from Calendar 39 7. Still from History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige 43 8. Still from Measures of Distance 43 9. Frame enlargement from Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet 45 10. Frame enlargement from Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet 45 11. Frame enlargement from Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet 46 12. Frame enlargement from Who Needs a Heart? 47 13. Frame enlargement from Handsworth Songs 49 14. Frame enlargement from Handsworth Songs 49 15. Archival photograph from Bon toe Eulogy 52 16. Frame enlargement from Bontoc Eulogy 53 17. Still from Credits Included: A Video in Green and Red 57 18. Still from Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) Speaking for oneself... Speaking for others 58 19. Still from Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) Speaking for oneself... Speaking for others 58 20. Still from This Is Not Beirut 59 21. Frame enlargement from Chronicle of a Disappearance 61 22. Frame enlargement from Chronicle of a Disappearance 61 23. Frame enlargement from Bontoc Eulogy 67 24. Frame enlargement from Seven Songs for Malcolm X 69 25. Still from Talaeen a Junuub 69 26. Production still from The Perfumed Nightmare 70
Frame enlargement from Calendar 72 Still from Chinaman's Peak: Walking the Mountain 75 Still from water into fire 75 Frame enlargement from Who Needs a Heart? 76 31. Still from History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige 83 32. Frame enlargement from Finagnon 83 33. Frame enlargement from Love, Women and Flowers 98 34. Still from Papapapd 100 35. Still from Imagining Indians 103 36. Still from Imagining Indians 103 37. Still from Imagining In dians 103 38. Still from History and Memory 107 39. Still from Missing Lebanese Wars 108 40. Still from Missing Lebanese Wars 108 41 . Frame enlargement from Great Girl 111 42. Still from History and Memory 113 43. Still from Seeing Is Believing 113 44. Shauna Beharry 117 45. Still from Seeing Is Believing 128 46. Still from Seeing Is Believing 128 47. Still from Seeing Is Believing 128 48. Frame enlargements from Hopiit 135 49. Still from Aletheia 136 50. Still from Aletheia 136 51. Still from Ekleipsis 137 52. Still from Measures of Distance 155 53. Still from Changing Parts 155 54. Frame enlargement from Far From You 157 55. Still from I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Inside 158 56. Still from I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Inside 158 57. Still from Sniff 173 58. Still from Sniff 173 59. Frame enlargement from Girl from Moush 174 60. Frame enlargement from Chimera 178 61. Still from The Island with Striped Sky 179 62. Still from Identical Time 179 63. Still from Identical Time 181 27. 28. 29. 30.
Still from Her Sweetness Lingers 186 Installation view, Corps etranger i8g Frame enlargement from Mysteries of July 197 Still from Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories ig8 68. Frame enlargement from And Still I Rise 210 69. Frame enlargement from And Still I Rise 210 70. Still from Qaggig 217 71. Still from Saputi 217 72. Production still from Siskyavi 2ig 73. Frame enlargement from Daughters of the Dust 225 74. Still from Maigre Dog 227 75. Still from A Box of His Own 233 76. Still from A Box of His Own 233 77. Frame enlargement from The Trained Chinese Tongue 237 64. 65. 66. 67.
Preface
Of the many cinematic images to which I return throughout this book, three are most insistent. One is the image of a woman filling a canteen with water, a memory-image that Rea Tajiri creates of her mother in the videotape History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991). Another is the movement of a camera caressing the sur face of a still photograph of the artist dressed in her mother's sari, in Shauna Beharry's Seeing Is Believing (1991). Finally, there is the blurry, tactile image of the naked body of the artist's mother in Mona Hatoum's Measures of Distance (1988), as a voice-over speaks of her longing to press her faraway daughter close to her heart again. The similarity of these images struck me only long after I was convinced of the works' importance. In each of them the artist, a woman, at tempts to recreate an image of her mother that has been erased or blocked through some movement of cultural dislocation. In each, she creates the new image from the memory of the sense of touch. These multisensory images stayed with me as I wrote The Skin of the Film, imparting an urgency to the hypothesis underlying this writing: that many new works in film and video call up on memo ries of the senses in order to represent the experiences of people living in diaspora. The title of this book, The Skin of the Film, offers a metaphor to emphasize the way film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between perceiver and object represented. It also suggests the way vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one's eyes: I term this haptic visuality Finally, to think of film as a skin acknowledges the effect of a work's circulation among different audiences, all of which mark it with their presence. The title is meant to suggest polemically that film (and video) may be
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thought of as impressionable and conductive, like skin. I mean this both to apply to the material of film and videotape, as I argue in
and video is beginning to show up in mainstream and commercial media as well. Despite these shared interests, my goal is not to develop a com prehensive theory of embodiment and sensory representation in cinema. These are areas of growing critical interest, to which this book is a contribution. All of us hold knowledge in our bodies and memory in our senses. Experimental and mainstream narra tive cinema are increasingly interested in representing these kinds of knowledge and memory. But for most Western cinema, these sources are supplements to the many other representatio nal re sources it has at its disposal. By contrast, intercultural cinema needs to appeal to embodied knowledge and memory in the absence of other resources. Intercultural cinema has quite specific reasons for appealing to the knowledge of the senses, insofar as it aims to rep resent configurations of sense perception different from those of modern Euro-American societies, where optical visuality has been accorded a unique supremacy. A related difference between inter cultural cinema and other kinds of experimental and mainstream cinema is that it stresses the social character of embodied experi ence: the body is a source not just of individual but of cultural memory. Consequently, my discussion of embodiment and sense perception is not wholly applicable to works in the individualistic tradition of avant-garde cinema. For the same reason, it cannot be imported wholesale to describe commercial cinema. I believe and hope that the theory of representation that emerges by the end of this book—auratic, embodied, and mimetic—will be appropriate to many kinds of cinema other than the intercultural works I describe here. It is, however, these works that have raised the stakes of such a theory of representation, and it is from them that it developed. This book's interdisciplinary approach draws on sources within and outside film theory, including postcolonial theory, art history, anthropology, feminist theory, phenomenology, cultural geogra phy, and cognitive science. My ar gument is especially informed by theories of embodied spectatorship, which have a lineage in phenomenology and feminist criticism. Anthropological resear ch in the embodiment of culture, and the translation of cultural ex perience through travel, also supports my conten tions. Within film theory, the work of Gilles Deleuze is an impo rtant unifying element
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thr oughou t the book, wor th briefly discussing here. As cinema theo rists such as Kobena Mercer (1988), Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989, 1991),
embodied experience, and why it should do so. Indeed one reason XV for writing a book about intercultural film and video is to catch up verbally with arguments that these works have developed in audio- TI visual (as well as verbal) form. As much as possible I engage with 2, these films and videos as I engage wi th theoretical writings. I rely on CD them to draw out and critique the ideas with which I am working. Only rarely do I "critique" or even analyze them; instead I weave the works into my argument as much as possible on the same level as the written resources. The reader will notice that many of the works I describe in this book are quite wordy, what with the use of voice-over, dialogue, and written text. This practice is partly drawn from the voice-over tra dition in documentary, although the content of the voice-over tends to be quite poetic or speculative. It is partly a reflection of the gen eral, often deconstructive emphasis on language in experimental films and videos of the per iod in question, the mid-1980s to the mid1990s. In addition, many works of intercultural cinema rely on spo ken words to present cultural countermemories, through oral histo ries, explanatory voice-overs, and dialogue. These works fall back on words to say what they cannot show. Words suture the work to gether in the absence of a stable, informative image or a linear story line. Not only experimental works, but also dramatic narratives like Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992) often use dialogue pedagogically, to coax out the memories suggested in image and sound. Voices, not only informative witnessing or testimony, but also casual conversation, the texture of talk, and the simple presence of a clear or incoherent voice in counterpoint to the image, activate cultural memories. In some cases the words become more poetic, less an ex planation of what cannot be imaged than an evocative layer of their own, as in works by Shani Mootoo, Roula Haj-Ismail, and Seoungho Cho. I find that many artists have been gradually shifting away from this emphasis on language, as they grow impatient with the word and begin to trust the sound and image to work on their own. The Skin of the Film is devoted to sensory representation in inter cultural cinema, but it does not undertake a detailed discussion of the role of sound, important though it is. I acknowledge that I am giving short shrift to the power of nonverbal sound to have mean ing in ways that cannot be redu ced to simple signification. Sound can be uncanny, moving the listener in ways that cannot be easily
described or contained. Also, like the other senses, the use of hear ing differs markedly from culture to culture. Characteristically, in CD Western societies and urban spaces, sound is primarily an informa& tion me dium (Rodaway 1994,113), and dialogue-centered narrative CL. cinema reflects this use of sound. But sou nd can also be ambient and textural: as I suggest briefly in chapter 3, sound too can be hap tic. Music, talk, ambient sound, and silence are important to many of these works and to the feeling of embodied experience they pro duce. Yet sound in intercultural cinema is such a large topic that I would not be able to discuss it effectively as a separate subject. It has been provocatively theorized by several writers (for example, Jafa 1992, Gabriel 1989, Masayesva 1995). Ultimately, the reason that I tend to exclude sound from this discussion is that I am most inter ested in meaning that lies outside the means of cinematic signifi cation, namely, visual image and sound, altogether. I have chosen to focus on the intriguing question of how film and video represent the "unrepresentable" senses, such as touch, smell, and taste; and of course sound plays a large part in the answer. Sound does come into play insofar as it is experienced kinesthetically; for example, the booming in the chest caused by deep bass tones, or the complex effects of rhythm on the body. And ultimately the exile of the senses of hearing and vision in my analysis is only temporary, for I will return to argue that all the senses work together in the embodied experience of cinema. Cinema is not fundamentally verbal and thus does not carry out lines of reasoning the way written theory does. Cinema exists on the threshold of language, and language must bring it across in order to have a conversation with it. As much as possible I attempt a kind of writing that stays close to its object rather than analyzing it from a distance, allowing the work in question to suggest the most ap propriat e response. This is especially the case with works such as I discuss, whose politics and poetics are inextricable, and which evoke a response that is simultaneously intellectual, emotional, and visceral. As these film- and videomakers are developing cinematic languages, so am I developing a critical and theoretical framework to meet their work: my language, like theirs, is necessarily explora tory and evocative. In the case of emerging forms of expression such as those of inter cultural cinema, it is important to be sensitive to the ways they
xvi
can convey meaning that do not find ready analysis in curr ent film xvii theory. The films and videos I discuss in this book have taught me how to understan d them (or to recognize the limits of my und er^ standing), how to be attentive to their subtleties, silences, and sur- S, prising visceral effects. Through engaging with these works, I have CD found it necessary to understand how meaning occurs in the body, and not only at the level of signs. The elements of an embodied re sponse to cinema, the response in terms of touch, smell, rhythm, and other bodily perceptions, have until recently been considered "excessive" and not amenable to analysis. 1 1 will argue that they can indeed be analyzed—or, more properly, met halfway. Ultimately I argue that our experience of cinema is mimetic, or an experience of bodily similarity to the audiovisual images we take in. Cinema is not merely a transmitter of signs; it bears witness to an object and trans fers the presence of that object to viewers. The mimetic relationship between viewer and cinema easily describes the relationship be tween writing and cinema as well. Writing about these films and videos requires imposing a form on them but also allowing them to point beyond my wo rds. I draw them into my arguments, but in the end they slip beyond my use of them. They are critical works, but the point of their criticism is to make room for something to emerge.
Acknowledgments
Over the course of the researching and writing of this book, I have been inspired, shocked, and blessed by the company of many art ists, scholars, and friends. I am most grateful for the intellectual generosity of the people who have read portions of this manu script and otherwise helped it along, including Shauna Beharry, Lisa Cartwright, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Robert Foster, Faye Ginsburg, Peter Harcourt, Dick Hebdige, Mike Hoolboom, Randi Klebanoff, Ming-Yuen S. Ma, Scott MacDonald, Charles O'Brien, Bethany Ogdon, Walid Ra'ad, Ian Rashid, David Rodowick, Jayce Salloum, Vivian Sobchack, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Diane Waldman, Janet Walker, Janet Wolff, and Patricia R. Zimmermann. I am also grateful to Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press and to Dana Polan and Catherine Russell, the readers whose thoughtful and incisive com ments helped bring the manuscript through its gangly adolescence. My unbounded thanks go to Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose rigorous and creative intercessions sharpened the dull corners of the manu script. Natalie Neill produced an exquisite index. For inspiration I credit the Robert Flaherty Seminar, where I first saw many of these works. Finally, my deepest thanks and love go to my parents, Anne Foerster, William B. Marks, and Jack Diamond, who have supported my efforts with unquestioning love and their own shining intel lectual examples. I especially thank Anne Foerster for sharing her neuroscientific research with me. I thank the Luce Foundation and American Council of Learned Scholars, the Mellon Foundation and Pew Charitable Trust, the Rush Rhees Foundation, and Carleton University for generous fellowships that allowed me to complete this work relatively quickly. Portions of this writing were also supporte d by the Lyn Blumenthal Fund for
XX In depend en t Video, the Arts Council of Ontario, and the Banff Cen tre for the Arts. w Part of chapter 1 has been published in an earlier version as "A o Deleuzian Politics of Hybrid Cinema," Screen 34:3 (Autumn 1994). op Parts of chapter 2 have been published in earlier versions as "Trans^ national Objects: Commodities in Postcolonial Displacement," Para2 chute 81 (Spring 1996), and "Fetishes and Fossils," in Feminism and o Documentary, ed. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999). Part of chapter 3 has been pub lished in an earlier version as "Video Haptics and Erotics," Screen 39:3 (Autumn 1998).
Introduction
In this book I trace, with a great deal of optimism, an elusive and ex citing body of work, which I call intercultural cinema. Most of this work comes from the new cultural formations of Western metro politan centers, which in turn have resulted from global flows of immigration, exile, and diaspora. Most of the artists whose work is central to this movement are cultural minorities living in the West, often recent immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, as well as First Nations makers. I focus on work produced in the United States, Canada, and to a lesser ex tent Great Britain, but this movement is an international phen ome non, produced wherever people of different cultural backgrounds live together in the power-inflected spaces of diaspora, (post- or neo-) colonialism, and cultural apartheid. Intercultural cinema is characterized by experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge, or living as a minority in the still majority white, Euro-American West. The violent disjunctions in space and time that characterize diasporan experience—the physi cal effects of exile, immigration, and displacement—also, I will ar gue, cause a disjunction in notions of truth . Intercultural films and videos offer a variety of ways of knowing and representing the world. To do this they mus t sus pend the representational conventions that have held in narrative cinema for decades, especially the ideologi cal presumption that cinema can represent reality (Mercer 1994b, Deleuze 1986). Formal experimentation is thus not incidental but integral to these works. Intercultural cinema draws from many cul tural traditions, many ways of representing memory and experi ence, and synthesizes them with contemporary Western cinematic
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practices. I will argue that many of these works evoke memories both individual and cultural, through an appeal to nonvisual knowledge, embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses, such as touch, smell, and taste. In particular, I explore in the third chapter how certain images appeal to a haptic, or tactile, visuality. Haptic images, I suggest, invite the viewer to respond to the image in an intimate, embodied way, and th us facilitate the experience of other sensory impressions as well. These sense experiences are not separate, of course. They combine to form culturally defined "sen suous geographies" (Rodaway 1994), or our sensory experiences of place. More fundamentally, they inform each person's sensorium, the bodily organization of sense experience. My challenge is to sug gest how film and video, which are audiovisual media, can repre sent nonaudiovisual sense experiences. Intercultural cinema is a movement insofar as it is the emerging expression of a group of people who share the political issues of displacement and hybridity, though their individual circumstances vary widely. On the one hand I see this movement eventually lead ing to significant changes in the politics and poetics of representa tion at a broad cultural level. On the other, I recognize that many of these works are quite ephemeral, and I wish to celebrate them at the moment of their brief flowering. Though in some ways intercultural cinema is as old as the movies themselves, the movement in its new and most powerful incarnation emerged roughly bet ween the years 1985 and 1995. This emergence reflects the conjunction of several factors: the rise of multiculturalism as an intellectual and policy issue; major changes in the avail ability of funding for noncommercial cinema in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom; and an intellectual climate char acterized by the disintegration of master narratives and a growing conceptualization of knowledge as partial and contested. The periodization that I propose is also in part determined by the fact that intercultural cinema is ceasing to be a movement and becoming a genre, that is, a body of works with shared concerns about style and content. Some commercial feature films have also been produced during this per iod that deal in sophisticated ways with intercultural representation; in addition, some of the makers whose work I explore here have "graduated" to quasi-commercial feature film production. Many of the characteristics of intercultural
cinema that I describe in the following chapters have become more mainstream, in theatrically released films that deal explicitly with the contemporary mixing of cultur es in metropolitan centers, some times in formally experimental ways. These include, for example, Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1986), Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala (1992), Srinivas Krishna's Masala (1991) and Lulu (1995), Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992), Haile Gerima's Sankofa (1993), TrinhT. Minh-ha's A Tale of Love (1995), and some other films that fall into the gray area between noncommercial and commercial production. I hope that this genre will become more common, fed by the experi ments in intercultural cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, I would hope that the category of intercultural cinema will cease to be conceptually useful, as the intercultural and transnational status of all cinema becomes harder to ignore. However, this periodization also has to do with the dwindling opportunities for people to make this work. Institutionalized racism prevents many artists from ever gaining the recognition and fund ing to continue to produce their short films and videos, let alone feature-length work. Multicultural public funding policies, for all their many problems, have meant that artists of color had some access to financial support, but as public funding vanishes it is ex ceptionally difficult for them to gain support from private or com mercial sources, harder than it is for a white independent or ex per imental filmmaker (see, for example, Givanni 1995). Also, most of the works that inform my argument are short (under one hour) and in some way formally experimental, qualities that are easiest to accommodate in noncommercial contexts. I worry that the pro liferation of such work over the last ten years or so will diminish to a trickle, given the demise of public funding. This would mean that there will be less opp ortunity for the sort of formal experimen tation and work on the politics of representation that have been crucial to the development of intercultural cinema. Even more im portant, and integral to the "formal" characteristics of this work, are the alternative production, distribution, and exhibition structures that support it: these too are threatened by the combination of mainstreaming and defunding of intercultural cinema. Both political and experimental cinema movements have always been suspicious of mass circulation, and making commercial cinema still involves sig-
nificant compromises. The rise of director Mira Nair to panderer of cultural exoticism for white audiences, in her recent films The Perez Family (1995) and Kama Sutra (1996), is but one example of how the commercialization of multiculturalism tends to evacuate its critical effects. And so I fear that the period I describe may conclude in both the popularization of intercultural cinema and the crippling of its most critical potentials. I will be delighted if events in the coming years prove this fear to be unfounded. The history of intercultural cinema parallels, and in some cases prefigures, a broader history of Western intellectual interests of the past fifteen or so years. Many individual works of intercultural cinema reflect all this history in themselves, intellectual ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, as it were. Many of these artists (those who were making work fifteen years ago) were making explora tions of language and representation at a time when academia was seized by semiotic theory; many have done work of a psychoana lytic bent; many have made primarily feminist films and tapes; many began making primarily queer work. Such young veterans in clude Mona Hatoum, Jayce Salloum, Rea Tajiri, Janice Tanaka, and Paul Wong. When broader cultural interest (or, narrower academic interest) turned to questions of racial and ethnic identity, many art ists shifted their work to address these concerns. Indeed, some have argued that the intellectual fashion for multiculturalism has forced them in the direction of "representing the race" because that is where funding has been available (Fusco 1988b; Bray 1996). Yet iden tity politics have been productive for many artists, who often con clude that identity must be viewed as a process rather than a posi tion. This process is a painful one, leading to a feeling of cultural homelessness that is the subject of manyfilmsand tapes. At the same time, the frustrated search for identity has compelled a turn to his tory, in order to produce and record individual and communal his tories. At this point much of the work is clearly activist, tracing the effects of racist, colonial, and imperial mis- (or non-)representation on the lives of now-diasporic peoples. Yet often the work of histori cal excavation is done in the full knowledge that these stories are willful constructions of irretrievable histories, based on collective fantasies and dreams (Hall 1988a). It is at this point that my work in The Skin of the Film begins. Many works continue to be produced that reflect the agendas described
above. It is more recent that intercultural artists are in a position to interrogate the historical archive, both Western and traditional, in order to read their own histories in its gaps, or to force a gap in the archive so that they have a space in wh ic h to speak. Yet to undertake all this work, which requires t he sometimes traumatic interrogation of personal and family memories, only to create an empty space where no history is certain, can be a psychically draining experi ence. The story suspends in order to contemplate this emptiness, which is narratively thin but emotionally full: it is the product of a process of mourning, a search for loved ones who have vanished and cannot be recalled with any of the means at the artist's disposal. These lost loved ones may be people, places, or even ways of in habiting the world. The grief may be individual or widely shared, but in these films and tapes it becomes a collective experience. What I wish to examine in this book is the tentative process of creation that begins at the time of grieving: in effect, the scent that rises from the funeral garlands. This process describes the move ment from excavation to fabulation, or from deconstructing domi nant histories to creating new conditions for new stories. It is the holding on to artifacts of culture, including photographic and filmic images, in order to coax the memories from th em. It is the attempt to translate to an audiovisual medium the knowledges of the body, in cluding the unrecordable memories of the senses. When verbal and visual representation is saturated, meanings seep into bodily and other dense, seemingly silent registers. The films I explore here coax these silent registers, not to make signs (which is the work of semiosis), not to tell stories (the work of narrative), at least not initially, but to have meaning by virtue of their very implacable difference from the visual and the audible. From the traumatic dislocations of culture and efforts at remembering, "newness enters the world" (to borrow Bhabha's phrase, 1994a).
Why "Intercultural Cinema"?
Before examining the term "intercultural" and its alternatives, let me here note why I refer to this body of work as "cinema." Many of the works I examine are videotapes, which are often excluded from the category of motion pictures. While for many of these artists, work ing in video is an aesthetic choice, it is clearly also an economic one.
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Many artists refer to themselves as filmmakers despite the fact that they work in video; many begin in video and move to 35mm film production, often bypassing 16mm as they ventur e into the feature film market: for example, Shu Lea Cheang and Elia Suleiman each moved from experimental video to 35mm film. Thus it is important to establish a continuity between the media even while noting their formal, institutional, and per haps ontological differences. Whether they are short experimental works or feature-length narratives, I choose to refer to all these works as cinema, because not only are they all time-based, audiovisual media, but also the word refers to the experience of an audience gathered in a theater. That these the aters are often drafty screening rooms in nonprofit galleries, and not the well-upholstered halls the term usually connotes, makes it a perverse pleasure to include these marginal viewing situations squarely inside the institution of cinema. It is with some hesitation that I have chosen the rather mild term "intercultural" to describe these works. I do not intend this term to bear a great deal of conceptual weight: we have plenty of words that do that, which I will continue to use. Many terms have been proposed and later rejected to describe this kind of cultural pro duction and its sociopolitical context: these include "Third World," "minority," "marginal," "antiracist," "multicultural," "hybrid," "mes tizo," "postcolonial," "transnational," "Third Cinema," "imperfect cinema," "hybrid cinema," "interstitial cinema," and so on.1 In some cases it is more useful to return to a term we are supposed to have "got over," as Stam and Shohat (1995) do when they reassert the use fulness of thinking in term s of "multiculturalism," as well as of other unfashionable terms such as "Third World" and "Fourth World," in order to indicate the continuing urgency of issues that the coining of a new term seems to resolve. 2 By surveying some of these terms, I would like to begin to suggest the issues at stake in intercultural cinema. At the same time I would caution that, while many terms are strategically useful, none should be able to contain this work and thus to dictate what it ought to be. "Intercultural" indicates a context that cannot be confined to a single culture. It also suggests movement between one culture and another, thus implying diachrony and the possibility of transforma tion. "Intercultural" means that a work is not the property of any single culture, but mediates in at least two directions. It accounts
for the encounter between different cultural organizations of knowl edge, which is one of the sources of intercultural cinema's synthesis of new forms of expression and n ew kinds of knowledge. A problem with this term is that it could suggest a politically neutral exchange between cultu res, and this is never the case in any of the works I dis cuss. However, the term avoids the problem of positing dominant culture as the invisible ground against which cultural minorities ap pear in relief. Instead it implies a dynamic relationship between a dominant "host" culture and a minority culture. Certainly the domi nant in the cases I discuss is almost always the hegemonic, white, Euro-American culture. But the site of power is always sliding and its agents regrouping, and to discuss cinema as a relation between cultures makes room for a variety of "hosts," destinations, and sites of power. Also, the term "intercultural" can describe exchanges be tween nondominant cultures. Hamid Naficy's "independent transnational genre" reclaims film makers like Michel Khleifi and Trinh T. Minh-ha from the marginal genres of "ethnic" and "avant-garde" respectively (1996,120). By ac knowledging the transnational position of exile, emigre, and refu gee filmmakers, the genre allows films to be read both as authorial texts and "as sites for intertextual, cross-cultural, and translational struggles over meanings and identities" (121), which are also con cerns of the works I discuss here. The difference is that many inter cultural filmmakers, though they identify with more than one cul tural background, live in the country in which they were born. "Multiculturalism" has been and sometimes still is a useful term to remind us that we live in a society composed of many groups— but it implies the perspective of white or other dominant people who have been able to assume that their society continues to constitute the overarching culture. Because of its use in official policy, such as arts funding quotas, the term "multiculturalism" has come to mean the naming and slotting of difference (Bailey 1991) and often ends up homogenizing the struggles of the diverse groups it intended to empower (Marchessault 1995b). A later term to arrive into general use, "hybridity," provides a provocative contrast with the notion of multiculturalism. Cultural hybridity, like the metaphor of genetic mutation from which it draws, is necessarily unpredictable and uncategorizable. The hybrid reveals the process of exclusion by which nations and fixed cultural identities are formed, forcing the domi-
nant culture to explain itself (Bhabha 1994b). Hybridity does not simply turn the tables on the colonizing culture: it also puts into question the norms and knowledges of any culture presented as dis crete, whole, and separate. The term "hybrid cinema" also implies a hybrid form, mixing documentary, fiction, personal, and experimental genres, as well as different media. By pushing the limits of any genre, hybrid cinema forces each genre to explain itself, to forgo any transp arent relation ship to the reality it represents, and to make evident the knowledge claims on which it is based. Hybrid cinema is in a position to do archaeology, to dig up the traces that the dominant culture, and for that matter any fixed cultural identity, would just as soon for get. One cannot simply contemplate a hybrid (or a work of hybrid cinema): one cannot help but be implicated in the power relations upon which it reflects. This power of contamination and implica tion is something I will return to in the discussion of fetishes and fossils in chapter 2. "Postcolonial" and other terms that describe relationships among nations are only somewhat useful to describe the movement of cinema I discuss here. Despite its theorists' intentions, "postcolonialism" has become a conceptually omnivorous term that swallows distinctions of nation, location, period, and agency. Aijaz Ahmad (1995) points out that "postcolonial" ignores political relationships other than, and sometimes predating, colonial ones and maintains the binary relation between former colonizer and colonized. An ad vantage of the term "postcolonial" is that it emphasizes the history of power relations between the entities it designates, even if the identity of these entities is uncertain and the "postness" of those power relations a matter of debate. In this it has an advantage over a term like "multicultural," or, for that matter, "intercultural." Yet the relations between cultures that animate the film and video works I describe here can only be termed colonial, or postcolonial, or neocolonial in the broadest sense. Certainly the long-term effects of European colonization in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, and the colonization of Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Pa cific Islands by the United States, prompted a great deal of the inter national flow of immigration that brought people from these nations to Western metropolitan centers. Slavery is a particularly violent
instance of colonization, so violent that the experience of African Americans and Canadians and British Blacks 3 from the Caribbean is better described as exile or diaspora. And the case of aboriginal or First Nations people 4 cannot be subsumed under the term "coloni zation": "apartheid" is more appropriate to describe the appropria tion of land, confinement to reservations, and forced education. Ideologies of cultural nationalism conflate the dominant, usually white culture with a national culture, both of which intercultural cinema works to denaturalize. Yet intercultural cinema tends nei ther to seek inclusion for another cultural group in the national mosaic (multiculturalism) nor to posit an alternative nationalism (separatism). Hence part of the slipperiness of the term "intercul tural": often the relationship is not between two cultures but be tween a racial minority group (Black, Asian, Latino, First Nations, and so on) and a Eurocentric nationalist discourse. Issues of nation, nationalism, and national borders will recur thro ughout these chap ters. However, "culture" is something that travelers bring with them more consistently than "nation"; it is the stuff that passes through national borders and transforms nations from within. Nationalist discourse prevents the understanding of diasporan ex perience in quite practical ways as well. Works by minorities who continue to claim a nonassimilated cultural heritage are often re jected as "not really" American, Canadian, British. Many of these works are produced in more than one nation: Lebanon-Canada, Jamaica-England, Hong Kong-United States. Films and videos about issues that cross national borders often cannot secure funding from national sources alone, and often must combine international fund ing sources. National funding policies that give priority to exclu sively national artists constrain production, distribution, exhibition, and criticism of intercultural cinema, realigning this work with the very nationalist discourses that it critiques. Finally, the powers at work in global movements of people are in creasingly less those of nations th an of corporations, whose transna tional power has begun to exceed that of governments. Intercultural cinema takes part in a global current that flows against the wave of economic neocolonialism, by making explicit the cultural and eco nomic links between peoples that capital erases (see Zimmermann and Hess 1997). In chapter 2 I examine how intercultural films re-
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trace the paths of global capital, as well as more idiosyncratic flows of people and things, rematerializing and re-embodying the global movements that transnational capital seeks to render virtual.
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Formal and Politi cal Precedents
The formal experimentation of most intercultural cinema has an aesthetic and political legacy that is worth briefly exploring. Questions of form cannot be separated from the political conditions in which these works were produced. Cultural diaspora is a produc tive as well as a destructive movement. When experience takes place in the conjunction of two or more cultural regimes of knowl edge, filmmakers must find ways to express this experience that cannot be in terms of either: experimental form helps to express the emergent knowledge conditions of intercultural experience. The synthetic qualities of intercultural cinema draw on histories of formal cinematic experimentation. Thus its genealogy includes Euro-American experimental cinema, especially its uneasy but pro ductive intersection with political work. Experimental documen tary, or what Nichols (1991) calls "reflexive documentary," such as the work of Chris Marker, Jean Rouch, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, pro vides a generous legacy to intercultural cinema. Certainly, much of intercultural cinema qualifies as what Julio Garcia Espinosa (1970) calls "imperfect cinema" because the makers' resources are limited. More importantly, these works share Garcia Espinosa's ideal that the films of an emerging political movement are necessarily partial and incomplete. They manifest "imperfection" in quite different ways, however. Much of the intercultural work descended from the activist Third World Newsreel tradition values a by-any-means-necessary look: different film stocks mixed with video, hand-held camera, in-camera editing, and so forth. British film/videomakers, in contrast, have developed a convention of ele gant, polished-looking images made economically by filming in the studio. The stylized tableaus i n works by John Akomfrah, Pratibha Parmar, Isaac Julien, Ngozi Onwurah, and other British artists, which derive in part from their resources in television, have influ enced the style of a number of Canadian and U.S. artists, particu larly, it seems, those whose work has been produced in the wellequipped studios of the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Intercultural cinema has been implicitly and explicitly theorized by a number of writers and artists, in cluding Black Audio Film Col lective, Julio Garcia Espinosa, Coco Fusco, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Teshome Gabriel, Kobena Mercer, Hamid Naficy, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, who describe the ways that cinematic form cultivates a politics and poetics by which to represent the experi ence of racial minorities and diasporic peoples. Their writings often emphasize this work's double movement of tearing away old, op pressive repr esentations and making room for new ones to emerge. From its earliest formulations, intercultural cinema obviates the distinction between "Western" and "non-Western" practices. Many of the Latin American makers and theorists of the Third Cinema movement took up critical and activist traditions of European and North American cinema. Similarly, Teshome Gabriel's (1988) theory of nomad aesthetics is Afrocentric but intercultural in its synthesis of European, African, Latin American, and Asian sources. In short, the works of intercultural cinema cannot be attributed a single cul tural origin; they are wholly products of cultural synthesis. The relationship between politics and form is most clearly articu lated, thus worth a closer look, in the development of one of the most important sites of intercultural cinema production. The new Black British cinema emerged in the context of a new class of Black intellectuals in Britain. In British polytechnics, or public universi ties, numerous Black artists and scholars took up the dialogue be tween theory and activism that had come to define British cultural studies (see Hall 1986). This intellectual context is inextricable from the context of the Black uprisings in the borough of Lambeth in early 1981 (the "Brixton riots") and in Handsworth and Tottenham in 1985, in response to police brutalization and murder of Black people. The racist national response to these uprisings and the lack of media representation of Black stories precipitated organized responses by British Blacks, including the urgent de mand for self-representation.5 The body of work produced by Black Audio between 1986 and 1993 was concerned with the historical archive—what gets included in it, and who has access to it—in terms from the rigorously theoreti cal to the literal. The structural, as well as visible, racism of the mainstream documentary media of film, television, and the print press is a subject that recurs throughout Black Audio's works. Their first, controversial feature, Handsworth Songs (1986), responded to
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the racist media coverage of the "riots" in Handsworth following the death of Mrs. Cynthia Jarrett after a bungled police raid. Attempting to trace the story from within the Black neighborhoods, the film found only, in an often-quoted line, "ghosts of stories." This film, and Sankofa's Passion of Remembrance (1986), can be seen as precedents for mu ch of intercultural cinema's interest in questioning the political and cultural limits of what can be represented (see Fusco 1988a). The energetic debate over the political and aesthetic concerns of the new Black British cinema culminated in several events and docu ments in 1988, including Screen 29:4, "The Last 'Special Issue' on Race?" edited by Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, and ICA Docu ments 7: Black Film, British Cinema (1988), the expanded docu ment of a conference held at London's Institute of Contemporary Art. These essays and interviews by filmmakers and scholars return repeatedly to the "new language" these works were creating and the enthusiastic, puzzled, and hostile responses they engendered among critics and audiences. 6 Noting the varied reactions to Handsworth Songs and The Passion of Remembrance, Kobena Mercer undertook to describe the "difficult," self-reflexive aesthetics of this work. Mercer's essay "Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagina tion" (1994), first published in "The Last 'Special Issue,'" amounts to a manifesto of intercultural cinema. Black British filmmaking of the 1960s enjoyed a brief creative period (Pines 1988, 29-30), but these films relied upon the "reality effect" of dominant cinema in order to communicate clear statements of protest and political mobiliza tion (Mercer 1988a, 57). By contrast, Mercer argues, the new modes of Black film discourse critique naturalistic representation and lib erate the filmic signifier "as a material reality in its own right." This strategy describes other modernist cinematic practices as well, but wha t distinguishes the new Black British cinema is that the signifiers are "liberated" in order to represent collective memory. The goal is, in Mercer's words, to "reclaim and excavate a creole countermemory of black struggle in Britain, itself always repressed, erased and made invisible in the 'popular memory' of dominant film and media discourse" (58). In other words, there is an alternative archive of Black knowledge that resides in some different order from the fram ing discourses. Paul Gilroy (1988) similarly argues that the emerging cinematic language will be a redemptive modernism specifically in-
formed by African diaspora aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Black cultural politics, he writes, is "not about the waning of affect but about its preservation and reproduction" (46). Like the Creole countermemory Mercer describes, the affective memory Gilroy rec ognizes at the foundation of African diasporic narratives is a memory that cannot be expressed in Eurocentric ter ms: a memory stored in safekeeping until a means of translation can be found. This search for the means to represent memory, clearly visible in the intellectual and political history of Black British cinema, is paralleled in more diffuse ways in other nodes of intercultural cinema production.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure of intercultural cinema is a delicate but nev erthe less material web connecting artists, sources of funding, product ion sites, and venues for distribution and exhibition. Many intercultural artists are young, "emerging" (an optimistic term which assumes that resources will continue to be available to them), or even first-time makers. Some have master's degrees in art or film production, while others are self-taught or picked up their skills in workshops and apprenticeships. Most of these film- and videomakers are familiar with contemporary critical theory, indeed steeped in it. Many of them are poor, given the typical downward mobility of artists in the Western countries in question. Understand ably, many communities of recent immigrants ascribe a stigma to the choice to work in the arts instead of some useful, income-generating profession, and this under scores the feeling among intercu ltural film/videomakers of existing between two (or more) worlds. They earn their living like other independent artists: they work for com mercial film and television production, they teach, they occasion ally have grants that cover subsistence, and they cobble together part-time jobs. Much of this work relies on outside funding. The ludicrously tiny and yet still embattled amounts of state funding for independent media can be seen in proper perspective when Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino advocate "producing and distributing guerrilla films with funds obtained from expropriations of the bourgeoisie— that is, the bourgeoisie would be financing guerrilla cinema with a bit of the surplus value that it gets from the people" ([1969] 1983,
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60; italics in original). Arts funders could do worse than to take this as their mandate. In the three countries under consideration, alternative filmmakers and artists of color rely on government funding. In Canada, the Canada Council, the National Film Board of Canada, Telefilm Canada, the provincial arts councils, the Ontario Film Development Corporation, and other state-run agencies are encouraged (though not mandated) to sup port a high percentage of work by so-called visible minorities. This climate of suppor t is partly a result of quasi-protectionist Canadian cultural policies in response to the barrage of U.S. popular and "high" culture. These resources began to crumble in recent years as a result of the Canadian reces sion and new funding policies that replicate the slashing of public funding in the United States. In 1997 Parliament legislated a $25 million increase in the budget of the Canada Council for the fol lowing five years, but this still does not return funding to previ ous levels. Private foundations are virtually nonexistent in Canada, which means that most not-for-profit cultural production is sub ject to government guidelines; hence, perhaps, the atm ospher e of cultural responsibility that some Canadian artists find slightly suf focating. Nevertheless, the relatively high rate of funding has meant that in Canada, as in Britain, more artists have bee n able to pro duce outside academic settings than is the case in the United States. Nothing like the high levels of Canadian public funding for art ists of color exists in the United States. However, beginning in the mid-1980s, public funding initiatives by the National Endowment for the Arts (such as its Expansion Arts category), the state arts councils, the Independent Television Service (a subsidiary of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting fo unded in 1988, in response to pressure from independent makers for more representation on PBS), and others were launched to allocate funds to cultural minorities. Yet the rise of public funds targeted to minority artists in the 1980s has been more than offset by overall cuts in state arts funding. Part of these cuts have taken the form of regional redistribution, at the levels of grants both to organizations a nd to individual artists. While the pur pose of this funding shift was ostensibly to limit bureaucracy at the federal level, it reflects the general "new federalist" shift of responsibilities to state and nongovernmental sources, relieving the federal government of its mandate to set policy for the allocation of money for the arts. Private foundations have taken up multicultural
policies as well, especially in the United States. State policymakers 15 there expected private foundations to rush into the breach of gov ernment funding cuts to the arts. Foundations can afford to be more ~ daring than government agencies in their funding policies, one of g the most progressive being the Rockefeller Foundation's Intercul- 0 tural Film/Video Fellowships. But these foundations' resources, as gwell as being finite, are also capriciously and interestedly disbursed; the Ford Foundation, Philip Morris, and other foundations under standably invest in projects that will reflect well upon their spon sors. Notwithstanding all our criticisms of multiculturalist slotting, the loss of a government mandate to fund innovative art and art by people of color increases the likelihood that what does get funded will be politically and aesthetically conservative, and dominated by white makers. Independent feature funding is a somewhat different issue, since most feature-length works need seed money from distribution or broadcast sources while the work is still in its early stages. Again, while in Britain and Canada there has been a greater degree of sup port specifically for makers of color, in both these countries and in the United States it is extremely difficult for ind ependent features by people of color to get off the ground. Despite demographic evi dence to the contrary (such as the 25 percent of U.S. cinema ticket sales to African Americans), commercial distributors and broad casters tend to doubt the profit-making potential of these projects. Long traditions of independent feature filmmaking by people of color exist in all three countries, but in general the ability to experi ment with the means of representation has been seen as a "luxury" that makers could not afford. Films and videos that expe rim ent wit h the means of representation are thus doubly difficult to fund (Davis *995> 452). Years of devotion are required for makers of color (and, to a smaller degree, all independent producers) who work in ex perimental styles to produce feature films. Those who have done so include Julie Dash [Daughters of the Dust, 1992), Haile Gerima [Sankofa, 1993), Shu Lea Cheang [Fresh Kill, 1994), Srinivas Krishna [Lulu, 1995), Dee Dee Halleck [The Gringo in Mafianaland, 1994), Lourdes Portillo (£7 Diablo Nunca Duerme [The Devil Never Sleeps], 1994), Thomas Allan Harris [Vintage: Families of Value, 1995), Midi Onodera [Skin Deep, 1995), Elia Suleiman [Chronicle of a Disap pearance, 1996), and Rea Tajiri [Strawberry Fields, 1997). The title
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of Chris Eyre's "calling card" short for Smoke Signals (1998), He Who Crawls Silently Through the Grass with a Small Bow and One Bad Arrow Hunting for Enough Deer to Feed the Whole Tribe, illus-
trates the headstrong resourcefulness of the intercultural feature filmmaker. The films and videos I discuss in this book were produced within a large network of sites, including med ia access centers, colleges and universities, public television stations, cable access programs, and of course garage and bed room studios. Some were produce d as stu dent works. Individual makers often shepherd their work through every tortuous stage of production, from applying for production grants to submitting the finished work to festivals. But a number of these works benefit from umbrella organizations that integrate the fundraising, production, and exhibition processes. These organiza tions have the resources to support intercultural production over a long term, rather than the debilitating step-by-step process under gone by film/videomakers working alone. For example, Third World Newsreel trains and supports productions by young makers of color, often distributing their final products. The now disbanded British workshops, including Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa, and television production companies such as Igloolik Isuma Pro ductions, have been able to follow multiple projects through the development, production, and broadcast stages. The Inuit Broad casting Corporation supports all stages of the production process, allowing some individuals to train up from novices to professional producers (see Roth and Valaskakis 1989; Brisebois 1991; Valaskakis 1992; Marks 1994a). Examples of IBC programming include Igliniit (1989-91), a live hunting show produced by Philip Joamie; Super Shamou (1990-94), a children's show by Barney Pattunguyak, fea turing the hybrid superhero of the title; Kippinguijautiit (1986-) a magazine-style teen program produced by Mosesie Kipanik; and Takuginai (1987-) a children's show featuring Muppet-like puppets, produced initially by Blandina Makkik and later by Leetia Ineak. Some of these producers have left IBC, including Pattunguyak, Mak kik, and producer Paul Apak; the latter now works with the in dependent Igloolik Isuma Productions. The corporation has been bitterly criticized by member s of Igloolik Isuma Productions for constraining and exploiting its Inuit staff producers (see Bourgeois 1997, Colin 1999). Nevertheless, such production centers are remark-
able for their ability to support ongoing production and, in the case of IBC and the British workshops, to have direct access to broadcast. They mark exceptions to the general pattern of individual produc tion for intercultural film and video. Once the work is made, intercultural film/videomakers have a great challenge to distribute and exhibit it. Since many of these works are short, they struggle in a market oriented toward features or, at the shortest, half-hour television programs. Many short inde pendent films are produced as "calling cards" to entice industry to invest in the filmmaker's feature script, but this is rarely the case i n intercultural cinema, for several reasons. Some of these films and videos are ephemeral, one-time works by artists who, like Mona Hatoum and Shauna Beharry, usually work in other media. Many of these short, experi mental works are self-sufficient, making a point perfectly in 11 or 27 minutes that would be lost in a feature-length production. Since so many of these works are not considered com mercially viable because of their subject matter and style, their mak ers are, ironically, freed from the pressures to court commercial production sites. The pressure to produce a feature, regardless of whether it is appropriate at this stage in an artist's development, has created costly and time-consuming disasters. Nevertheless, some of the artists whose work I discuss in this book, including Shu Lea Cheang, Cheryl Dunye, Helen Lee, Alanis Obomsawin, Elia Sulei man, and Rea Tajiri, "graduated" more or less successfully to feature film production. Screening slots on Channel Four in England, PBS in the United States, the CBC in Canada, a tentatively increasing num ber of cable channels such as the Independent Film Channel, BET (Black Indep endent Television), and the Sundance Channel, satellite ventures such as Deep Dish TV, and local public television stations, have made it viable for some of these makers to produce for or mar ket to television. However, much of this work cannot be screened on television, given that medium's requirements of high produc tion values and minimally unconventional form. Some videomakers have shifted to video installation, which has a higher profile in the gallery scene than single-channel video does; others have moved from video to interactive media. For these short films and videos and short-run theatrical fea tures, independent distributors, such as those listed in this book's film/videography, are crucial. These distributors deal with festivals,
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galleries and mu seums, and academic bookers, with management styles ranging from actively marketing film/video packages to comg plete laissez-faire. Often subsidized by government grants—and § depend ent on rentals and sales to mus eum s, universities, and other Jj institutions that are themselves lately in crisis—even the longest *o established distributors have a precarious existence. The choice of 3 distributor is an important decision for artists, who may feel a politi cs cal alliance with one distributor and an aesthetic affinity to the work H of another; many ultimately choose distributors who have the most efficient bureaucracies and guarantee the makers their percentage of rentals and sales, even if this means some sacrifice of political or aesthetic integrity. Some film/videomakers choose to distribute their work themselves. Like other experimental cinema, intercultural cinema rarely makes it into commercial theaters. Instead it circulates to nonprofit and artist-run centers, galleries, museums, festivals, colleges and universities, public and satellite television, community centers, and activist organizations. Feature films do receive runs at art-house t he aters. For short works, thematic programming is crucial. It is at the level of programming that the decision whether to organize around identity politics or around more intercultural themes often rests. For example, programs at LA Freewaves and Toronto's Images festival tend to organize works from very racially diverse video artists, teenaged makers, and activist groups around idiosyncratic themes. This allows the festivals to showcase the complexity of each work and the unexpected connections among them. Similarly, in 1991 and 1993 Third World Newsreel's Lorna Johnson organized two packages, "D'Ghetto Eyes" and "D'Ghetto Eyes II," featuring films and videos made through Newsreel's production workshop. Director Ada Gay Griffin describes the movement from production to exhibition as an organic process. We're interested in young artists at the early stage of their careers, and in building audiences for people who have difficulty try ing to find audiences. Participants in our workshops have been getting more and more sophisticated and clear about how they wanted to use the media, new artists like Michael Cho or Thomas Harris that could be marginalized [in other contexts]. Short works alone are interesting, but how do you get African Americans to see Asian American works that they might like? We deal with a number of audiences that have issues in common—issues of
humor, of style, of hybridity, especially in an urban setting. Younger audiences get into it. (Griffin 1993) The discourse around intercultural cinema that these events sup port is, of course, extended into print, but considerably less often than that for more established bodies of work. Often festival and dis tribution catalogues and slim screening brochures contain the only written information about these works (for example, Fusco and Colo 1991, Rashid 1993, and Salloum 1996); others leave no traces at all in writing, only in the word of mouth of people who have seen them. Audiences: The Skin of the Film
Intercultural cinema assumes the interestedness, engagement, and intelligence of its audience. As Toni Cade Bambara remarks, the re ward of a demanding film such as Daughters of the Dust is partici patory spectatorship and an "empowered eye" (1993,133). Similarly, Victor Masayesva Jr. (1995) argues that Native audiences are impa tient for works that will push the expressive boundaries of film and video in order to tell their stories. Is there an intercultural audience? In the preceding pages I have paid more attention to the "live" audien ces at festivals and the like than the presumably larger, but diffuse and perhaps disinterested, television audiences. It is at the live events that one can see the audience that has been constituted around this work, and this is a thrilling event that the circumstances of virtual audiences just don't permit. Screenings of intercultural cinema witness the build ing of an audience, often from surprisingly disparate individuals. As Douglas Crimp points out, coalitions based on shared identity are "productive of collective political struggle, but only if they result in a broadening of alliances rather than an exacerbation of antago nisms" (1993,12). Such cross-identification means that identities are never static but always relational, capable of creating links among different groups that transform those groups. Coalitions must re sult in mutual transformation if groups are not to simply come to gether around a joint purpose and then go their separate ways when their goal is accomplished. Intercultural cinema itself, as one of the visible traces of cosmopolitanism, carries out the process of trans forming a coalition into a new cultural formation.
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In a more subtle but no less important process, transformative coalitions are also built over time as well as in shared space. When a small, independent film or tape circulates among different audiences, each context adds to the meaning of the work. Most of these works are rare and ha rd to get hold of. Few copies are in circula tion, and anyone who under takes the complicated arrangements to screen them cannot help bu t be aware of their farflung itineraries, shipping from, say, Rotterdam to Vancouver to New York. They carry whatever physical damage they may incur from one engagement to the next. In their rarity, such works are like bodies that must be as siduously protected (Marks 1997a). Because the audiences for intercultural cinema are small and dis parate, they have a more proprietary relationship with the works than do audiences for commercial cinema. Intercultural cinema moves in specific, traceable paths, from local broadcast to college lecture room, from community hall to art museum, from a screen ing for the maker's family and friends to a artist-run center. Each viewing expands the meaning of a work; as reception theorists say, it completes it. Each new discursive context becomes part of the ma terial of the film or video, and subsequent viewers often take these contexts into account as part of their experience of the work. For ex ample, Daughters of the Dust came to art-house audiences already claimed by enthusiastic audiences of African American women. A work like Richard Fung's Chinese Characters (1986) or Nguyen Tan Hoang's Forever Jimmy! (1996) brings traces of its queer audience to its screening at an Asian American festival, and carries the marks of its Asian viewers to the queer festival circuit. Igloolik Isuma Produc tions' Qaggig (1989), first screened on Inuit television, was already marked by Inuit viewers when it screened at the Museum of Modern Art; anthropology students viewing Qaggig in a classroom should be aware of traces of both the work's art-museum and Inuit audi ences. What word of mouth has already established, journalism and criticism solidify in tracing the links between audiences. Reproducible though they are, the med ia arts cannot be conceived of separately from the sets of viewers that give th em meaning. Traces of other vie wings, of differently seeing audiences, adhere to the skin of these works. I am arguing that mechanical reproduction does not necessarily turn a work into a simulacrum, endlessly available for reinterpretation—at least not works like these, whose prod uction
and distribution is community bound. Instead of being wrenched from one context into another, intercultural films multiply their contexts. Their very circulation is a kind of coalition building, re inforced by networks both ephemeral and concrete, from gossip and e-mail to community organizations, university classes, and funding agencies. Toni Cade Bambara describes th e audience of African American women as Daughters of the Dust's "authenticating audience." But most audiences cannot authenticate: intercultural works are tailormade only for a very few people. A viewer of intercultural cinema may be aware that her underst and ing of it is imperfect, but that other viewers' knowledges complement her own. She knows that meanin g inheres in the image, whether or not it can be deciphered. Obviously, the appeal of intercultural cinema to a politics of identity is limited, since the identities it presents are almost always shifting and emerg ing. Intercultural cinema appeals to the limits of naming and the limits of understanding, and this is where it is most transformative. In the first chapter of this book I discuss the intellectual and aes thetic grounds of many works of intercultural cinema in terms of a search for the language with which to express cultural memory. This search leads initially to a confrontation with silence and ab sence. I suggest that intercultural cinema performs an excavation of the available sources of recorded history and memory, only to find that cultural memory is located in the gaps between these recorded images. Consequently, I argue, many works of intercultural cinema begin from th e inability to speak, to rep res en t objectively one's own culture, history, and memory; they are marked by silence, absence, and hesitation. All these works are marked by a suspicion of visuality, a lack of faith in the visual archive's ability to represent cultural memory. The use of silence and absence of visual image in these works may make them appear insubstantial, but I consider it to be an opening toward the exploration of new languages, new forms of expression. Chapter 2 establishes a basis for these new languages that involves a radical reconsideration of how cinema signifies, one less visual than material. I propose a concrete, "fetishistic," and auratic theory of representation. Amplifying the rather wistful fetishism of Walter Benjamin and Andre Bazin, I argue that film or video may be con-
sidered to have aura, because it is a material artifact of the object it has witnessed. Thus cinema functions like a fetish, in the anthro pological sense described by William Pietz: an object whose power to represent something comes by virtue of a prior contact with it. Gilles Deleuze's term for certain kinds of images with the power to revive memories, the "fossil," is also powerfully descriptive of cinema's disturbing ability to recreate its object in the present. I ex amine a number of films and videos that deal with traveling objects, objects that materially embody the culture they represent. The rest of the chapter centers on the work of Shauna Beharry, whose video Seeing Is Believing uses the medium's ability to make tactile contact with, not simply visual record of, an object: her own mother's body, and the sari she wore. As chapter 2 suggests, one of the important ways that cinema can embody cultural memory is by awakening memories of touch. Chap ter 3 explores how the sense of touch may embody memories that are unavailable to vision. I posit an epistemology that uses touch, rather than vision, as its model for knowledge, namely, mimesis. I go on to suggest that if vision can be understood to be embodied, touch and other senses necessarily play a part in vision. I argue that, since memory functions multisensorially, a work of cinema, though it only directly engages two senses, activates a memory that neces sarily involves all the senses. I suggest that an understanding of the embodied experience of cinema is especially important for repre senting cultural experiences that are unavailable to vision. Finally, I offer a theory of haptic visuality, or a visuality that functions like the sense of touch. A number of works of intercultural cinema use haptic images to engage the viewer tactilely and to define a kind of knowledge based in touch. Chapter 3 begins to suggest how cinema represents different cul tural organizations of the senses, but it is in the final chapter that I discuss at length how the importance assigned to different kinds of sense experience varies from culture to culture. In chapter 4 I look at a number of works that appeal to touch, smell, taste, and indeed entire environments of sense experiences. Anthropologists describe how the organization of the sensorium reflects these cultural pri orities. Neurophysiology and cognitive science suggest how all the senses are capable of learning and of encoding memory, and thus how they can be vehicles for cultural knowledge. Although cinema
is an audiovisual med ium, synesthesia, as well as haptic visuality, enables the viewer to experience cinema as multisensory. These sen sory experiences are, of course, differentially available to viewers depending on their own sensoria, but I argue that sense experience can be learned and cultivated. I suggest that the meeting of cultur es in the metropoli is generating new forms of sense experience and new ways of embodying our relation to the world. These emerging configurations of sense experience contribute a countercurrent to global culture's increasing simulation of sensory experience.
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1 The memory of images
Intercultural cinema by definition operates at the intersections of two or more cultural regimes of knowledge. These films and videos must deal with the issue of where meaningful knowledge is located, in the awareness that it is between cultures and so can never be fully verified in the terms of one regime or the other. Yet the re lationships between cultures are also mediated by power, so that the dominant regime—in the following examples, some configura tion of the historical Euro-American hegemony—sets the terms of what counts as knowledge. Other knowledges cannot be expressed in its terms. They may evade expression because of censorship; be cause memory is inaccessible; or because to give expression to those memories is to invite madness. They may become subsumed to the dominant regime and forced to speak its language: this is the token ism of multicultural cinema. In the face of these erasures, intercul tural cinema turns to a variety of sources to come up with new con ditions of knowledge: written history, sometimes; the audiovisual archive; collective and personal memory; fiction; and the very lack of images or memories, itself a meaningful record of what can be expressed. Cultural knowledges are lost, found, and created anew in the temporal movement of history and in the spatial movement between places. In this chapter I dwell on archaeological models of cultural memory, while in the next chapter spatial acts of travel and physical contact will predominate. Intercultural cinema moves backward and forward in time, in venting histories and memories in order to posit an alternative to the overwhelming erasures, silences, and lies of official histories. There are many examples of film/videomakers who have begun by con fronting the lack of histories of their own communities that result
from public and personal amnesia. These artists must first dismantle the official record of their communities, and then search for ways to reconstitute their history, often through fiction, myth, or ritual. I can mention only a few of the best-known of this large body of archaeological works: it includes mu ch of the work of Black Audio Film Collective, suc h as John Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs (1986), Testament (1988), and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), and Reece Auguiste's Mysteries ofJuly (1991) and Twilight City (1989); Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien's The Passion of Remembrance (1986), Julien's Looking for Langston (1989), and other works by Sankofa; Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992); Janice Tanaka's Memo ries from the Department of Amnesia (1990) and Who's Gonna Pay for These Donuts Anyway? (1992); Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996); Elia Suleiman's Homage by Assassination (1992) and Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996); Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum's Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the end of an argument) Speaking for oneself... speaking for others (1990); Jayce Salloum and Walid Ra'ad's Talaeen a Junuub (Up From the South) (1993); Richard Fung's The Way to My Father's Village (1988) and My Mother's Place (1990); Yun-ah Hong's Memory/all echo (1990) and Through the Milky Way (1992); Alanis Obomsawin's Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), and Victor Masayesva's Ritual Clowns (1988), Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms (1991), and Imagining Indians (1994). This chapter focuses on a nu mb er of archaeological works, paying special attention to Rea Tajiri's History and Memory: ForAkiko and Takashige (1991), Raoul Peck's Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet (1992), Marlon Fuentes's Rontoc Eulogy (1995), Atom Egoyan's Calendar (1993), and John Akomfrah/Black Audio's Who Needs a Heart? (1992). As in many intercultural films and videos, the acts of excavation performed by these works is primarily deconstructive, for it is nec essary to dismantle the colonial histories that frame minor ity stories before those stories can be told in their own terms. Yet once this deconstruction has been accomplished, no simple truth is uncovered. There is a moment of suspension that occurs in these works after the official discourse has been (if only momentarily) dismantled and before the emerging discourse finds its voice. This is a moment of silence, an act of mou rning for the terrible fact that the histories that are lost are lost for good. Yet this mome nt is also enormously sugges-
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tive and productive. It is where these works begin to call up on other forms of cultural knowledge: it is where the knowledges embedded g in fetish-like objects, bodily memory, and the memory of the senses, £ which this book explores, are found. This process of discovery is £ like scavenging in a tide pool for the small, speaking objects that are *o briefly revealed there before the water rushes in again. In what fol^ lows I will note how the works in question point to these moments where ne w kinds of knowledge may emerge, knowledges to whi ch I 0 H return in the following chapters. I find the cinematographic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze most use ful to explore how intercultural cinema performs a multiphased ac tivity of excavation, falsification, and fabulation, or the making up of myths. I shall dwell on Deleuze's use of concepts from Bergson and Foucault; however, the ideas of Peirce, Nietzsche, Leibniz, and others are as thickly woven through Deleuze's cinema books. One of the most appealing aspects of Deleuze's two books on cinema is their open- ended quality. At first glance at these texts' astonishingly broad range of cinematic material and plethora of new terms, one could almost imagine Deleuze saying, like Walt Whitman, "You say I contradict myself; Very well, I contradict myself—I contain multi tudes." In fact (like Whitman's), their open-endedness is part of the internal coherence of Deleuze's philosophy. These writings on cinema may be brought productively to works of which he was not aware or that did not exist at the time of his writing. His cinemato graphic philosophy is always open to transformation, to producing new concepts. As Dudley Andrew has written, "Deleuze does not read images; he sees with images, using them as a source for what can yet be thought, not as a record of what has already been thought" (1997, xi). I inten d to make his theories thin k by bringing them into contact with new images. Intercultural cinema draws out the politi cal implications of Deleuze's theory of cinema. To demonstrate this I want to emphasize the alliance between dominant narrative form and official history, to draw out the political potential of mythmaking and of ritual, and to stress the collective nature of memory and per ception. If we trace Deleuze's understanding of perception back to its origin in Bergson, the disjunctions wit hin the kinds of informa tio n offered by a film can evoke other sorts of memory that slip from both official history and the audiovisual record: namely, memories encoded in senses other than the auditory and the visual. My discus-
sion is drawn from Walter Benjamin's critique of Bergson, theorists 27 of hybrid and minority cinema su ch as Teshome Gabriel and Hamid Nancy, and most importantly, the films and videos themselves. _a 0 One of Deleuze's important basic distinctions is that between movement-image cinema, in wh ic h frame follows frame causally, 0 according to the necessities of action, and time-image cinema, o which frees time from causality. Simply, in the movement-image, 0 Arnold grabbing the gun is followed by Arnold shooting the bad guy; g< in the time-image, Arnold grabbing the gun might be followed by era Arnold going into a reverie, or perhaps a step-printed reprise of the w gun-grabbing shot. Deleuze attributes the rise of time-image cinema to postwar European directors such as Rossellini, Antonioni, and Godard. His very derivation of the categories of movement-image and time-image implies that the new cinema became possible in an intercultural space. In order to emphasize the revolutionary poten tial of the new time-image cinema, Deleuze places great i mpo rtance upon the "any-spaces-whatever" that came to proliferate after the Second World War: The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer knew how to describe. These were "any-spaces-whatever", deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers. (Deleuze 1989, xi) I would argue that these any-spaces-whatever are not simply the disjunctive spaces of postmodernism, but also the disruptive spaces of postcolonialism, where non-Western cultures erupt into Western metropolises, and repres sed cultural memories retu rn to destabilize national histories. In this case the "new race . . . kind of mutant" to which Deleuze refers (in terms that suddenly take on a rather xeno phobic cast) describes the very real conditions of migration, dias pora, and hybridity that characterize the n ew populations of Europe and North America, especially in the periods following wars. The end of the modern period is characterized not only by industrial ruins but also by the dismantling of colonial power, whose ruins are perpetuated in the lives of the people it displaced. These people are "seers" in the metropolitan West, aware of violent histories to
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wh ich its domin ant population is blind. They possess what Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996) calls a third eye, which allows them to perceive g the dominant culture from bot h inside and outside. 2 Let me note here that Deleuze considered any-spaces-whatever to jjj constitute images that arouse an emotional or visceral response, that *o is, affection-images. Yet, whereas it is conventional for these emo^ tional responses to be immediately followed by action (Arnold feels anger and reaches for his gun), in any-spaces-whatever no action is Q H possible. Instead, emotion or feeling opens us to the experience of time (Arnold slips into a reverie). This disengagement of affective response from action will become important later in this chapter, and in this book as a whole, as I examine how the body may be in volved in the inauguration of time-image cinema.
Cinema as Archaeology
Intercultural cinema is in a position to sort through the rubble cre ated by cultural dislocation and read significance in what official history overlooks. In what follows I use a geological/archaeological metaphor for these historical searchings, so it is useful to carry a mental diagram, a cross section of sedimented layers that, at their deepest, harden into granite, but whose surface is volatile and vul nerable to wind, water, and other, more violent, forces. Deleuze's cinema theory draws from the simple principle, which he elaborated with Felix Guattari, that discourses are not only re strictive but enabling. While they limit what can be said, they also provide the only language in which to say it. In order to find expres sion, emerging thoughts and things must speak in the terms of the discourses that are established, though at the same time they break away from them. Political (indeed any) change must be effected in a sort of dance between sedimented, historical discourses and lines of flight, between containment and breaking free. This is the act of archaeology: combining elements from different strata in order to resist the order that would be imposed by working on one stratum alone (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 503), knowing that the result will be contradictory an d partial. For intercultural cinema, this trans lates to the need to work critically within dominant discourses, both cinematic and more broadly cultural, while simultaneously devel-
oping the powerful emergent lines of flight that will open them to 29 the outside. In Foucauldian terms, intercultural cinema works at the edge of ^ an unthought, slowly building a language in which to thi nk it. What ® can already be thought and said threatens to stifle the potential CD emerging new thoughts. The already sayable against whi ch inter- o cultural cinema struggles is not only official history but often also 0 identity politics, wit h their tendency toward categorization. Some of tr the works I will discuss confront the limits of thought, for example <$ CD
by showing what stories cannot be told through either official histories or individual remembrance. Others begin to work at the limits of what can be thought, by referring to the memories of objects, the body, and the senses. Many do both these things. 1 In intercultural cinema, the choice is usually to hold the image open to those possibilities of expression that are both threatening and enabling. The moments of thinness, suspension, and waiting in these films are not encounters with a dreadful void but with a full and fertile emptiness. The sorts of new thoughts enabled by "the unsummonable of Welles, the inexplicable of Robbe-Grillet, the undecidable of Resnais" (Deleuze 1989,182) are generated as well by the unevocable images of Peck, the undecidable images of Suleiman, t he inexplicable images of Tajiri. Deleuze compares the "powerlessness at the heart of thought" to a mummy (166): the thought that cannot yet be expressed appears paralyzed, petrified. Hence the quality of stillness that characterizes many of these works. The petrified ob ject regains life only in the process of developing a thought that can think it, a language in which it can be spoken. Intercultural cinema is not sanguine about finding the truth of a historical event so much as making history reveal what it was not able to say. Any trut h is lost in the event's discursive representation, in the layers of words and things that build u p over it. In the famous line from Handsworth Songs, "There are no stories in the riots, only ghosts of stories." Yet it is only by being inscribed in this way that an event can be said to occur at all. A film can recreate, not the true historical event, but at least another version of it, by searching into the discursive layers in which it was found. "If we want to grasp an event we must not show it," Deleuze writes, "we must not pass along the event, but plunge into it, go through all the geological layers that are its internal history (and not simply a more or less distant past)"
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(1989, 254-55)- Many intercultural works rely on idiosyncratic, per sonal narratives, because these provide a slim thread back into the strata of history. Following Foucault, Deleuze argues that experience cannot be represented directly and in its entirety, but only approach ed partially by the orders of the discursive and the visible, or the sayable and the seeable. These orders cannot be reduced one to the other. They are two incommensurable forms of tr ut h that confront each other at a given historical moment. " 'What we see never lies in what we say', and vice versa" (Deleuze 1988b, 64; quoting Foucault). A given dis course must be broken open to find its implicit statements, which cannot be conceived of in the terms of the discourse. Similarly, things must be broken open to find the visibilities implicit in them: "Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing to exist only as a flash, sparkle, or shimmer" (Deleuze 1988b, 52)/* Discourse and the visible, then, do not embrace the world, but only encapsulate what can be known at a given time. The seeable and the sayable appro ach each other asymp totically, showing each other to be false even as they require each other to be true. Cinema, because it is an audiovisual medium, is the privileged record of the disjunctive quality of "truth" in a given his torical formation. Reading Foucault literally, Deleuze understands the cinematic image to correspond to the notion of the visible, the layer of things in which one can read about a particular stratum or historical formation. Cinema is able to hear (though it rarely does) what is just beyond discourse and see the flash at the edge of known things. Image and sound tracks usually corroborate each other, but they can also be used to undermine each other, to show the limit of what each is able to represent. In the image is revealed "the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms" (Deleuze 1989, 244). What Deleuze's optical image does is "finally SEE" what has not been encoded in discourse, and finally hear it as well. Deleuze calls the visual and sound images that butt into each other but can not be reconciled in a single discourse "incompossible" images (a term from Leibniz), and such images abound in intercultural film and video. By the sayable, Deleuze seems to mean the dialogue in a film. This is limiting, because the sound track contains far more than words
and symbolic sound. For that matter, some elements of the image 31 track exceed the seeable, in that they are not acknowledged in the dominant discourse or regime of signs. All these extradiscursive H sounds and images appear as noise. This points to the uneven fit ® between a theory of "words and things" and the merely audiovisual CD object of cinema. In addition to Foucault's two categories, I believe o it is also possible to talk of an order of the sensible, which , like the 0 seeable and the sayable, is the sum of what is accessible to sense ff per ception at a given historical and cultural moment. Just as we can cS CD
only speak in the language that surrounds us, so we can only feel in the ways we have learn ed it is possible to feel. These matters will be addressed in due course, especially in chapters 3 and 4. This theory of an archaeology of the image helps show ho w intercultural cinema expresses the disjunction between orders of knowl edge, such as official history and private memory, by juxtaposing different orders of image, or image and sound tracks that do not cor respond to each other. Intercultural cinema reveals new history as it is being formed, the new combination of words and things that can not be read in terms of the existing languages of sound and image but calls for new, as yet unformulated languages. To r ead/hear the image, then, is to look/listen not for what's there but for the gaps— "mind the gap!," as notices read in the Toronto subways—to look for what might be in the face of what is not. Hence the importance of absent images (often, video black or black leader), barely legible images, and indistinguishable sound in so many of these works. History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, by Rea Tajiri, winds back through the images of Japanese Americans in fiction films and government newsreels during and after World War II, with a slim thread of imaginative narrative. Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet, by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, attempts to re construct the life of Patrice Lumumba, the first postindependence leader of Congo, from th e very events that prevent him from making a "proper" documentary: he mines political history from home movies, shots taken in an airport and a museum, and long, empty stretches of black film leader. Calendar, a film by Atom Egoyan, confronts a tourist's commodified images of his ancestral Armenia with incoherent memory-images of that country, from which a pro foundly repressed grief erupts. John Akomfrah/Black Audio's Who Needs a Heart? uses a mocking, irreverent, and ultimately mourn-
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ful fictional narrative to retrace the foundered history of the Black Power movement in Britain, weaving stories around the inaccessible historical facts of the career of Michael DeFreitas, or Michael X. Finally, Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy retraces the filmmaker's Filipino colonial history through the j ourney of his grandfather Mar cot from tribal life in the Philippines to the 1904 Saint Louis World's Fair. A viewer gradually realizes that Fuentes' tale is a fabulation. History and Memory attempts to reconstruct Tajiri's Japanese
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American family's memory of their int ern men t during the Second World War. The tape is both the record and the active process of her struggle to reactivate the past from the fragments of available image. Images exist to corroborate official accounts of the intern ments of Japanese Americans and Canadians during the war. But the unofficial histories of Tajiri's family's experiences cannot be docu mented, and the few artifacts they retain from the experience are silent. Furthermore, inexplicably for Tajiri, those who were in the camps seem willfully amnesiac—her mother barely remembers a thing about her imprisonment. It is by bringing together visual and audio images that are inadequate alone and contradictory together that Tajiri is able to evoke scenes and events that can't be recon structed. The tape begins with a black screen, and a scrolling text describ ing a scene viewed from overhead: . . . Slowly, very, very slowly the ground comes closer as the tops of trees disappear. The tops of the heads of a man and woman become visible as they move them back and forth in an animated fashion. The black hair on their heads catch and reflect light from the street lamps. The light from the street lamps has created a path for them to walk and argue. (The spirit of my grandfather witnesses my father and mother as they have an argument about the unexplained nightmares of their daughter on the 20th anniver sary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor... )
The bombing would lead to the forcible detainment of 110,000 Japanese Americans. This written description of an image (with no image) is followed by another, this time spoken. Tajiri's voiceover says: I don't know where this came from, but I just have this fragment, this pic ture that's always in my mind. My mother, she's standing at a faucet, and it's
l. Still from History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige
really hot outside, and she's filling this canteen, and the water's really cold, and it feels really good. And the sun's just so hot, it's just beating down, and there's this dust that gets everywhere, and they're always sweeping the floors. This second description is accompanied by a brief flash of a visual image, a dark-haired wo man filling a canteen. These two sequences, detailed descriptions of events for which there are no images, at tempt to replace the images that have "happened in the world while there were cameras watching," or that "we restage in front of cameras, to have images of." Such pictures must suffice, for none of the contemporary images—Office of War Information films of the camps, American and Japanese newsreels, and Hollywood war movies like From Here to Eternity—con serve as memory vehicles for Tajiri's family. Tajiri calls upon the spirit of the dead, namely her grandfather, to supply an image, drawing upon communal memory as a source of images when no others exist. When no image is avail able, in short, archaeology must be done in order to create images. The confrontation with official versions of history may be a vio lent one, or it may be a gentle drawing out of those histories' inter nal contradictions, as in the work of Anishnabek filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. Her film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), which deals with the Mohawk uprising at Oka, Quebec, in 1990, gently insists that the truth lies neither in legalistic government posi tions, mouthed by the callow young Canadian soldiers on one side
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of the barricades, nor in the authenticity of testimonies by Mohawk fighters on the other. She does not put one Mohawk in the position of spokesperson, for that wou ld merely mimic the authoritarianism of government officials. Rather, she lets the many voices of the First Nations commun ity suggest that the tr uth of their claim to the land cann ot be expressed in the ter ms of legalistic, territorial discourse. Like many intercultu ral filmmakers, Obomsawin maintains a skeptical distance from seemingly authoritative visible evidence. Oral histories and evocative drawings provide the Mohawk counterhistory to the seemingly more substantial archival documents of the European and Canadian colonizers. Trinh T. Minh-ha is another filmmaker who refuses the reassur ing mutual reinforcement of sound and image that gives a sense of authenticity to conventional do cumentary. In Trinh's Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) the audio/visual disjunction consists in the discovery, as several women talk on camera about their sufferings in Vietnam, that they are performing themselves. Their hesitation on camera is not "Asian" shyness but the uncertainty of underrehearsed actors. As slightly different versions of their words simultaneously scroll down the screen, one begins to doubt the women's halting statements. The women are there, but they are in a sense perform ing their own absence, or their replacement by images. Rather than supply the cliched images of testimonial documentary, the visual and sound images of the women (who are actually Vietnamese women living in the States) refuse to be authenticated. They under score the limitations of a film language that insists on examination and truthful revelation. Such a language would individualize and render digestible the women's stories of suffering. Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet similarly plays image and sound tracks off each other in order to tell a story that cannot be com municated in either one alone. The film documents, or attempts to documen t, the career of Patrice Lumumba, who held a two hundred day tenure in i960 as the first postindependence leader of the Bel gian Congo, later Zaire. Lumumba inherited a brutal colonial re gime, and its power was still entrenched when he took office. He was assassinated a year into his term, and little information is avail able about the conditions of his murder. Lumumba was believed by many to be the only politician who could establish a real democ racy in Congo: the film assembles shadowy pictures of a passion-
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2. Archival photogra ph from Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet. Courtesy of California
Newsreel.
ate, visionary, and perhaps naive man. Peck has an oblique angle on this history as a Haitian who was raised in the newly indepen dent Zaire. Narrated by the filmmaker, Lumumba interweaves a fractured history of Lumumba's short career with reminiscences of the filmmaker's childhood, each supplementing the other at crucial points. Peck includes among his influences Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker (Peck 1992), and the film consists of a violent confron tation between different orders of truth, as in Godard's work, and a gentle, caressing rumination on the impossibility of recovering his tory from its representations, as in Marker's. Like Tajiri, Peck was stymied in his research. The little archi val information he found about Lumumba came from the European news media, which were already clouded by Europeans' paternalis tic imaginings of African politics. He also found that this official his tory cost money. Peck complains that Movietone charged him $3000 for the rights to the footage of a British newsreel of Lumumba's ar rest on 27 November i960. "Memories of a murder are expensive," he says. Turning away from these sources, he draws history from homemovie footage of his childhood in Haiti and Zaire, accompanied by tales of political intrigue told by his mother. The filmmaker's inser tion of himself into the history of the country is especially appro-
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priate because his circumstances for being in Zaire have everything to do with the postindependence changes: the Peck family was part of a Haitian black elite that emigrated to Zaire during the transition from colonial rule in order to fill government positions vacated by the Belgians. His mother hel d a government post in the country for a time and knew a lot of information that did not make it into offi cial records. Given the blackout on official information in Zaire and the corru ption of European sources, Peck draws heavily on his mother's memory as an alternative historical authority. The voiced-over tales that he begins with "Ma mere raconte . . ." are not cosy private memories. His mother recounts, for example, that she quit her job one morning after she was asked to order rope, wood, and cloth for shrouds, to be used in the assassination of Lumumba's allies. The visual image is of young Raoul and his little friends dancing for the benefit of his father's home movie camera; but on the sound track his mother's stories of the simultaneous political events react caus tically with the images. For the viewer, this sequence's eerieness reflects a fall through the gap between seeable and sayable, the gap that movement-image cinema attempts to keep closed. Black Audio Film Collective uses a similar strategy of divorcing the visual from the verbal. As I noted in the Introduction, the col lective's representations of Black diasporan experience were always formed in struggle with hegemonic media images. By the time of Who Needs a Heart? it seemed that Black Audio had decided to de vote an entire film to "the ghosts of stories." The film proceeds en tirely without dialogue, and this is part of what prevents the viewer from easily connecting its visual images with official representa tions of the Black Power movement that contain and dismiss it. The film crystallizes around the rise of the movement in Britain and the figure of Michael X, variously considered a charismatic leader, opportunist, or petty criminal. It follows the lives of a fictionalized group of people i n Michael X's circle from 1963 to 1975. In their struggle to recreate the history of British Black Power and Michael X, Black Audio found that the archives of personal mem ory and recorded history aroun d Michael X were closed. Most of the television archival footage had been destroyed. Co-producer Avril Johnson says that the footage was destroyed after Black Audio first contacted the television networks, apparently in a measure to pre-
3. Frame enlargement from Who Needs a Heart?
Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective.
vent it from being reexamined (Johnson and Gopaul 1994). Also, like Raoul Peck, the filmmakers discovered that what footage they could find was prohibitively expensive (Johnson and Gopaul 1994). In addition, former Black radicals and rich whites who had slummed with the movement refused to go on record. So, as Akomfrah says, "What's the best way of quoting people who don't want to be ac knowledged? Make them mute" (Akomfrah and Givanni 1993). For this reason, Who Needs a Heart? had to rework documentary as docudrama, weaving a fictional story around a thread of question able history. The blocking of access to historical images often pro duces what Deleuze calls recollection-images, those floating, dream like images that cannot be assigned a connection to history. But the film's powerful affect shows that the infinite deferral of historical truth is painful and maddening. Another strategy filmmakers use to divorce the visual from the verbal record is to eschew full translation into English (or the lan guage of the dominant culture). Partial translation is an important strategy for many intercultural film/videomakers, including Trinh, Salloum and Ra'ad, Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, and Igloolik Isuma Pro ductions. Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva Jr. exhibits many of his works in Hopi with either no translation or a clearly incom plete one. In Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms (1991), an old wo man explains to her granddaughter, in alternating Hopi and English, the
4. Frame enlargement from Calendar.
Photo: Atom Egoyan. Courtesy of Alliance Atlantis Communications.
5. Frame enlargement from Calendar
6. Frame enlargement from Calendar
significance of the ceremonial patterns she is painting on a pot. A non-Hopi (or a Hopi who does not speak the language) will com pre hend that what she is describing is sacred; but the sacred elements of her speech are not translated. This not only protects the culture from prying eyes, but defies a viewer's conventional ethnographic expectation that the image is a window onto the culture. Atom Egoyan's Calendar is also str uct ure d around the losses that take place in acts of translation. The protagonist (played by Egoyan) is a Canadian photographer of Armenian descent (as is Egoyan) whose living and very mode of existence are to replace experience with images. His reason for being in Armenia is to produce photo graphs of country churches, turning the rustling, fragrant landscape into cheesecake images to be marketed in the West, perhaps for nos talgic exiles. The photographer's ignorance of and disinterest in the country of his heritage reflect the general Western disinterest and ignorance of Armenia's ancient culture, almost destroyed by geno cide. His wife (played by Egoyan's real-life spouse, Arsinee Khan jian), also a Canadian of Armenian heritage, becomes attracted to their native Armenian guide, Ashot. Watching through the viewfinder of his camera, the photographer is in thrall to images of his wife talking and wandering with the guide, and knows that he is losing her. These scenes, shown as flashbacks, alternate with scenes in which the photographer, back in his Toronto apartment, hires a series of women who vaguely resemble his wife to do the following: come to
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his apartmen t for dinner, excuse themselves on a prearranged cue, and make an erotic telephone call in their first language, be it, say, Macedon ian or Turkish. As the woman-of-the-moment stands next to a pictu re of the church-of-the-month, talking on the phone, they function as two virtual images (a concept I explain below), of the woman and the country the photographer refused to see.
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Categories of Image and Processes of Memory
Among Deleuze's many categories of images, the actual image, vir tual image, cliche, optical image, and recollection-image are espe cially important for my discussion of intercultural cinema, so it is necessary to devote some discussion to these terms. Drawing on Bergson's philosophy of duration, Deleuze proffers an image of time as always splitting into two parts: the time that moves smoothly forward, or the "present that passes"; and the time that is seized and represented (if only mentally), or the "past that is pre served." What Deleuze, following Bergson, refers to as the actual image and the virtual image are the two aspects of time as it splits, the actual image corresponding to the present that passes, the vir tual image to the past that is preserved. Thus we see that at the very moment that they diverge, the two types of image create two dis junctive rep resentations of the same moment. ("Image" in Bergson signifies not simply the visual image, but the complex of all sense impressions that a perceived object conveys to a perceiver at a given moment. See Bergson [1911] 1988, 36-38.) An example m aybe found in home videos of family gatherings. At the moment that the video is shot, the two aspects of time look the same; but the present-that passes can never be recalled (I feel ill; I am angry at my mother), while the past-that-is-preserved (we were gathered around the table, smiling) becomes the institutionalized representation of the mo men t. Virtual images tend to compete with recollection-images—the memory I have of the gathering that is not captured in the video— and, as we know, their power is such that they often come to stand in for our memories. In effect, the past-that-is-preserved has hegemony over the repre sen tation of the event, be it ho me movies of Thanksgiving 1998 or the televised Los Angeles rebellion of 1992. If instead of home movies we think of television news, for example, the political implications
of these divergent sorts of image become apparent. Clearly this is 41 not a question of which image is "true," but of which has a more tenacious representation, and whi ch representation has more con- _g tinuity with the layer of images that preceded it. Television, movies, ® and other "public" images compose a sort of official history, while CD 3 the unpreserved present-that-passes is more like unofficial history o or private memory. To confront one with the other is to dig between 0 discursive strata—in the process, perhaps finding trace images of tr unofficial or private memories. <$ CD
The photographer in Calendar rigorously controls the process of image construction, as though to hurry actual images into their sus pension in virtual images. He spends the entirety of the tr ip to Arme nia fixed behind the viewfinder of his video camera, while his wife and her guide and apparent lover wander in and out of the frame. When she translates the guide's information to the photographer, she conveys his disapproval as well: "He doesn't like to tell about this place—he thinks you should let your eyes discover it." She tries to convince him to leave his camera and join them for a walk, but the photographer is adamant, adding in a retrospective voiceover, "What I really feel like doing is standing here and watching while the two of you leave me and disappear into a landscape that I am about to photograph." His substitutions are highly fetishistic, both in psychoanalytic terms and in the sense that he is seeking to establish a uniform commodity value for all his experiences. He obsessively reviews the footage he shot of his wife, rewinding and fast-forwarding, in the attempt to manage her image and her mem ory. The women who come to him from the escort service barely resemble his wife, but they are meant to be equivalents, in the way that one dollar equals another. He adopts a foster child in Armenia and watches a videotape of her. "She costs me $28 a month," he tells one of his paid dinner companions. "Do you have children? How mu ch do they cost a mon th?" The photographer' s life is built of such uniform, interchangeable images. As I have noted, a certain quietism of the image characterizes many works of intercultural cinema, a reluctance to swing easily into narrative. This reluctance results from the fact that images are not neutral reflections, but representations made from an interested point of view. Perception, according to Bergson, is always partial and interested, since it is located in a specific perceiver; it is nee-
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essarily embodied, located, and contingent (Bergson [1911] 1988, chapter 1). Perception is, then, subtractive insofar as it means a thing is not perceived in its fullness but only in those aspects that interest the perceiver (Deleuze 1986, 63-64). The movement-image requires the viewer to accept the subjectivity implied in the image, to acquiesce to a hegemonic form of perception. "It could be said," Deleuze writes, "that the subjective-image is the thing seen by someone 'qualified/ or the set as it is seen by someone who forms part of that set" (1986, 71). In movement-image films, the viewer is su p posed to share the subjectivity implied in causality. The "qualified" viewer of action movies accepts the connection between Arnold shooting and the bad guy dying; the qualified viewer of dramas accepts the connection between a facial close-up and an interior monologue. (Though of course a viewer could, either through per versity or cultural unfamiliarity, refuse to make these connections and watch movement-image films in a state of wonderment.) By contrast, the time-image—which evokes a stranded eyeball, power less to draw upon resources of common sense—questions every thing about how this particular image got to be constructed from a given perception. It thus compels the viewer to start the act of per ceiving all over again, choosing which part of the available image is relevant. In fact, Deleuze argues, cinema necessarily pulls the viewer between objective and subjective poles, between accepting and reflecting upon a given image. In general, Deleuze's character ization of time-image cinema describes avant-garde works that, in their suspicion of representation, force the viewer to draw upon his or her subjective resources in order to complete the image. In intercultural cinema there is an additional, more overtly political suspi cion of the image, given that its cliches bear the weight of dominant history. For many works of intercultural cinema, then, the image is barely a beginning, and any extension into narrative must be hesi tant, or suspicious. In these works still or thin-looking images are ultimately the richest. Deleuze writes that the absence of image, such as with a black or white screen, underexposed or snowy image, has the "genetic" power to restore our belief in the world (1989, 200-201), to bring something new out of the ruins of the image. These thin images call on the viewer to search for their hidden history. In History and Memory, grainy old Super-8 footage smuggled from the prison
7. Still from History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige
8. Still from Measures of Distance. Courtesy of Video Out.
camp shows a woman skating on a tiny frozen pond in the desert. In Seoungho Cho's J Blinked Three Times (1993), a roadside bar dissolves in a blur of colors before the eyes of a weary traveler. In Mona Hatoum's Measures of Distance (1988], th e grainy, fleshtoned images, accompanied by a longing voice-over, are gradually revealed to be still photos of the artist's faraway mother. All these images are quite slight and "meaningless" in themselves, but they call up volumes of images that are not or cannot be represented. Lumumba depends up on the mut ual relation between the thin-
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ness of the image and the viewer's rigorous engagement, with the double purpose of emphasizing the fleeting and conditional nature of recorded images and forcing the viewer to recreate for herself the unrepr esentable events. Peck planned to shoot the film in Zaire. He recounts that he was first denied a visa, then granted one. Upon his arrival at the Brussels airport to make the flight, he spoke on the telephone with the Zairian officials who wou ld be meeting him. Finding that they were unu sually knowledgeable about him and his project, Peck realized that he would certainly be arrested as soon as his plane landed. He canceled his trip and, marooned, decided to make the Brussels airport the setting for his excavation of Zairian political history (adapting the strategy of Godard's Far From Viet nam, 1967). Brussels, then, becomes a blank screen on which Peck constructs his own alternative history of post-independence Zaire. In between he trains his camera on harried travelers, making up stories about them: "He wanted to be a classical guitarist. . . . She is in love with him, but he does not know." Peck's voyeuristic com passion for these children of the Belgian colonizers of the Congo is quite moving, and a wry reversal of the patronizing attitude of the Belgians toward their African subjects. Unable to represent Africa "live," Peck films the African exhibits in the Brussels natural history museum. He uses British newsreels from the 1950s to represent early events in the tran sition from colo nial rule. Both sources perpetuate many of the representations of Zaire that he intends to critique, but by showing only these images he reinforces the difficulty of representing a "view from the people's eyes." Like Tajiri, he inserts long segments of black leader, so that we see only darkness while his gentle spoken commentary sustains the film. This strategy is sometimes an acknowledgment that there is no other image for the events Peck is attempting to describe, sometimes a refusal to represent a horrific event. Referring to these sections of leader, he asks, "Are these black holes more corrosive than the images they hide?" Of course no records exist of Lumumba's assassination. When the voice-over finally comes to discussing the grisly murders of Lumumba and his two associates, Peck's camera is moving among the elegantly dressed and well-padded bodies at a state reception in Brussels. This strategy takes advantage of the lack of corroborat ing images—which would be red herrings in any case—to situate
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9 and 10. Frame enlargements from Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet
the responsibility for the assassination back in the colonial capital. While Peck relates details of the disposal of the bodies—the hang ing, the burning, the teeth found embedded in the bark of a tree—he shows us a single still image, a pen-and-ink drawing of the location in the forest where the murders took place. Between the delicate colors in which the site is captured and the sound of Peck's reticent, gentle voice, the horror and ugliness of the betrayal of Lumumba and his nation emerge with consuming power. The slightest of vir tual images suffices to signify, through omission, the overwhelming power of the historical event.
ii. Frame enlargement from Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet
Such apparently thin images, which Deleuze calls optical images, are characteristic of time-image cinema. The optical image is con trasted with the sensory-motor image of movement-image cinema, in particular the cliche, a commonsense, hegemonic image that extends unproblematically into action. Arnold with his gun, the American newsreels of the Japanese internment camps, and the European news stories of the postcolonial transition in Zaire are cli ches, calling on a habitual recognition without reflection. The opti cal image defamiliarizes the cliche by severing it from its context. The resulting image looks rarefied and abstract compared to the thickness of cliched images. But it is really the cliche that is abstract. It perceives from the image only what is useful in the terms of causal connections. As Deleuze puts it, "It is grass in general that interests the herbivore" (1989,45)—cows see in sensory-motor images, rather than perceive each tuft of grass in its completeness and particularity. By contrast, the restraint and thinness of the optical image "bring the thing each time to an essential singularity, and describe the in exhaustible, endlessly referring to other descriptions. It is, then, the optical image which is really rich, or 'typical'" (Deleuze 1989, 45). While cliches hide the object in the image, the optical image makes the object visible, in Foucault's sense of revealing what knowledge it constitutes. The optical image, because it cannot be explained and mobilized
12. Frame enlargement from Who Needs a Heart? Courtesy of Black Audio
Film Collective.
into action, requires the viewer to puzzl e over it. The inability to rec ognize an image encourages us to confront the limits of our knowl edge, while the film's refusal to extend into action constitutes a refusal to "explain" and neutralize the virtual image. Because the viewer cannot confidently link the optical image with other images through causal relationships, she is forced to search her memory for other virtual images that might make sense of it. This frustrating effect of the optical image seems to account for the anxiety that I noticed in many viewers at screenings of Who Needs a Heart?: an anxiety for solid biographical details about Michael X, for a clear plot line, for history, for causality. What the film gave were indeterminate circuits of virtual images. The reason for this is that no actual images of the events in question could be estab lished: not even personal memories that could be drawn out into histories; not even obvious lies that the filmmakers could refute. Who Needs a Heart? is structured like a certain mode of remem bering that excavates events that occurred in nonverbal, perhaps unconscious registers. It is a lush, stylized film. But its lushness comes not from the density of actual images and information but the opposite: it is the thinness of the optical image, emptying the
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image of information and filling it back up with color and sound. Trevor Mathison's palimpsestic sound track is as important as the images for creating a sense of meanings that are evoked and the n withheld. As Sean Cubitt describes it, "Built up from overlapping musics (gospel, blues, free jazz, Buddhist chants), electronic effects and samples, sou nd effects subtly unanchored from the image, di rect, pre-recorded and re-recorded dialogue, the audio track oper ates as well alongside the image, marking the diasporan scattering of meanings and peoples in repetition and polyrhythms" (1998,116). Returning to Bergson's terminology, we do not "perceive" an opti cal image purely in the cognitive sense, but rather our "attentive recognition" comes into play. Attentive recognition is the way a perceiver oscillates between seeing the object, recalling virtual images that it brings to memory, and comparing the virtual object thus created with the one before us. In so doing we create anew "not only the object perceived, but also the ever-widening systems with which it ma ybe bo un d u p" (Bergson [1911] 1988,105). Engaging with the freshly perceived object, we recreate it in higher expansions of memory and on deeper strata of reality. Thus the optical image pro vokes evocative contemplations whose temporality takes a spiral path through the circuits of memory rather than the forward motion of action (Deleuze 1986, 46). Attentive recognition is a participa tory notion of spectatorship, whose political potential shouldn't be ignored. If a viewer is free to draw upon her own reserves of memory as she participates in the creation of the object on screen, her pri vate and unofficial histories and memories will be granted as much legitimation as the official histories that make up the regime of the cliche—if not more. The act of attentive recognition, although it sounds dry in Bergson, is often a traumatic process. For example, for the photographer in Calendar, his effort to freeze the events in Armenia in photographs backfires as the thin optical images call u pon his memory to supply what really happened. In the pivotal scene in the film, the grainy, bluish Super-8 footage he shot of a flock of sheep running along side the car is paired with another virtual image, his wife's voice on the answering machine. "As you were taping, he placed his hand on mine. I remember because I gripped his hand so hard, watching you grip your camera as if you knew all the time. Did you know? Were you there? Are you there?" Her voice echoes metallically over the
13 and 14. Frame enlargements from Handsworth Songs
long-distance connection. Though the photographer attempted to manage memories by manufacturing virtual images, the inadequate visual and sound images of the video and answering machine force him to fill their gaps, with the painful memory of losing the woman he loved. Similarly, in Handsworth Songs, footage from the 1950s shows Caribbean families arriving by ship in England, the wo men in pretty dresses and their children disembarking full of anticipation. Haunting music diverts this scene from the cheery multicultural rhetoric that might ordinarily accompany it. The music renders the footage a series of optical images, ghosts of the hopes of two genera tions of Black British people. Watching it, a viewer who experienced
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the emigration, or whose par ents did, wou ld be able to reconsti tute these virtual images through memory, perhaps recalling how the high spirits of the newly arrived women sank to despair as they confronted walls of British institutional and everyday racism. Deleuze remarks that many films made by minorities invoke memory—not a psychological memory, bu t "the strange faculty that puts into immediate contact the inside and the outside, the peopled busi ness and private business" (1989, 221). Because official histories, with their official image repertoires, are often at odds with the pri vate histories of disenfranchised people, it is recollection-images— such as the memories of Tajiri's family members and the unsettling racontes of Peck's mother—that mus t confront the public and the private with each other. A recollection-image embodies a past event that has no match in the present image repertoire. It is one sort of virtual image called up by the process of attentive recognition. A recollection-image is not the direct image of a memory, how ever. "No doubt a recollection, as it becomes actual, tends to live in an image, but the converse is not tru e, and the image pure and simple will not be referred to the past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it" (Deleuze 1989, 54; quoting Bergson). A recollectionimage embodies the traces of an event whose representation has been buried, but it cannot represent the event itself. Through atten tive recognition it may provoke an imaginative reconstruction, such as a flashback, that pulls it back into understandable causal relation ships. What is more disturbing is when the optical image cannot be con nected to any living memory. When I find a high school yearbook at a flea market, or when I contemplate Christian Boltanski's wartime photograp hs of anonymous Jewish schoolchildren, I confront a vir tual image that does not correspond to my experience, nor perhaps to anybody's memory, yet it cries out to have a memory assigned to it. When attentive recognition fails—when we do not recognize or cannot remember—it creates. Rather than hooking up with sensorymotor extension, the optical image connects with virtual images that are dreams, fantasies, the sense of a general past (Deleuze 1989, 55). When remembrance fails, the story must be creatively falsified in order to reach the truth. Jalal Toufic (1996, 46) expresses this beau tifully: "What I dread when I am asked to bear witness is not only or primarily the pain of accessing extremely painful memories; and/or
the pain of discovering all or part of what I thought unforgettable; 51 but that I am asked also to definitively forget in order to release, this side of the event horizon, the created voice that can tell about a ere- H ated but true event." ^ The recollection-image, an image that confronts what cannot be ® represented and attempts to bring it into dialogue with memory, is o very similar to Walter Benjamin's definition of the dialectical image. ^ Benjamin's unfinished Passagen-Werk was inten ded to be a mon- & tage of visual images and verbal signs, true to Foucault's dictum cS CD
that "what we see never lies in what we say." He was especially fascinated by the detritus of nineteenth-century popular culture, in whose passe fashions and obsolete commodities he read the fail ure of the modernist ideology of progress (Buck-Morss ig8g, chap ter 3). As Bergson's recollection-image breaks loose from memory, so Benjamin's dialectical image drifts in the flotsam of history. The recollection-image has the power to falsify history, and the dialecti cal image demonstrates the wreck of modernity. The difference be tween them is that while in the dialectical image one can read the quasi-metaphysical essence of capitalism (Buck-Morss 1989, 73), in a sort of Marxist divination, the recollection-image is more partial, a road back to particular memories and partial histories. It is these inexplicable images that testify most profoundly to the forgettings of both official history and private memory, and that prevent intercultural works from confidently recreating a commu nity history from scraps of footage and passed-down stories. When images cannot be made to represent, when they refuse to connect to memory, they float loose from history. Unearthed in the excava tion of discursive history, these images stare up at us, like "strangely active fossils, radioactive, inexplicable in the present where they surface, and all the more harmful and autonomous. Not recol lections but hallucinations" (Deleuze 1989, 113). Such images are "harmful" because they cannot be reconciled wit h either official his tory or private memory—but they are more harmful to official his tory, because they falsify it or reveal it to be incomplete. They are volatile treasures for intercultural cinema, because if they can be made to speak they can activate the process of memory. Virtual images of people (and things) are sometimes so volatile that they consume the film that contains them. One strikingly "radio active" encounter with a virtual image occurs in Marlon Fuentes's
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15- Archival photograph from Bontoc Eulogy.
Courtesy of Marlon Fuentes.
Bontoc Eulogy (1996). The filmmaker has been telling the fiction
alized story of the Filipino tribespeople who were exhibited at the Saint Louis World's Fair in 1904, "illustrated" by ethnographic film and archival footage from the fair. When a member of the Bontoc tribe disappeared and was later found dead, Fuentes says, the dead man's captive relatives mourned him in the traditional way. What accompanies this story is footage of three (presumably) Bontoc women passionately (and silently) wailing. Successive close-ups re veal their repeated gestures of despair, their faces twisted with grief. Yet this indexical record of three anonymous women, at some un specified date, probably filmed by ethnographers in the Philippines, far exceeds the narrative use Fuentes makes of it. We long to know the real circumstances of these long-dead women, to assign a mem ory to their image, but their image cries out to be recognized in vain.3 "There are many instances in documentary," David MacDougall writes, "of the physical and spiritual being of a person seeming to
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16. Frame enlargement from Bontoc Eulogy
overflow the film that sets out to contain it. The film 'transmits' the presence, but it is as though the film is then consumed by it" (1994, 32). The three anonymous women consume the film. Their grief be comes the "sense of a general past" that haunts Fuentes' film. By using these archival images, Fuentes partially redeems them—not by filling in their stories, but by mourning the eternal loss of those stories. They are mediums of distant events that infect the present. Deleuze's theory does not account for the ardent desire with which intercultural filmmakers apply themselves to the rediscovery of memory and history in these strange and silent, "harmful and au tonomous" images. Like those dry paper flowers that expand in water, a recollection-image, moistened with memory, springs to life.4 Intercultural works redee m these stranded images by bringing the m into the very present, even into the body of the viewer. In the fol lowing chapter I will retur n to these cinematic fossils and the imagi native, and ultimately bodily, processes by which they are brought back to life. Whose dreams are engaged in this process? Not the rare viewer who immediately "recognizes" an optical image, for she will be able to bring it into contact with actual images. Not someone who pre fers the luxury of cliched images and can't be bothered to investigate optical images, unless perhaps as a perceptual exercise. Whether these thin images merely annoy or engage the viewer depends on what stakes the viewer has in the image. Similarly, it seems that
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recollection-images woul d prompt deeper reflection on the part of viewers who feel acutely the disturbance they create. Someone who is curious, who aches to know about the stories hinted at in these grainy images, scraps of archival footage, and maddeningly silent protagonists will be more likely to search the optical image and attemp t to bring it to life. Personal (and collective) history informs the liveliness of the engagement with the optical image. So, for example, wh en Raoul Peck pon ders in the chill corridors of the Brussels airport, the blanks will be filled differently depending on whether one has never heard of Lumumba, believes or doubts the newsreel re ports about him, or has heard rumors of the actual conditions of his murder. The suspension of action and lack of explanation will prompt many different reflections and circuits of recollection (or lack thereof) among Lumumba's audience. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) is discussed bot h by D. N. Rodowick (1997, 145-49) a n d by Jalal Toufic (1996, 40-49) as a deeply moving example of how memories might be willfully recreated in the absence of sound and image, and in the face of a blinding his torical forgetting, in this case the obliteration of all traces of the Nazi death camp at Chelmno, Poland. Yet every remembering comes at the cost of another forgetting. In a footnote, Toufic remarks that the Polish survivors whom Lanzmann interviews compare the forests in Israel with those of Lithuania, but that the filmmaker neglects to ask them about the exiled Palestinians who can no longer experi ence the forests of their hom ela nd (258). Certainly Lanzmann could not have been expected to ask this question. But another filmmaker has. The displaced Palestinians' return to the forests of their home land is memorialized in a bittersweet short film by Michel Khleifi, Ma'loulfete sa destruction (Ma'loul celebrates its destruction, 1991). The film follows the Palestinians who once lived in the town of Ma'loul, razed by Israeli soldiers in 1948. A forest is all that remains of the town, to which the villagers travel to make an annual picnic. Ironically, they can only make the tr ip on Israeli Indep endence Day, which celebrates the Palestinians' eviction from the land, because that is the only day the state allows them to travel to the site in what is no w Lebanon. Ma'loul is composed from "incompossible" images: 8mm footage of the old village; the official narration of the estab lishment of Israel on the same territory, which a schoolteacher half heartedly explains to his students in Arabic; and a fresco, painted by
one of the former residents of Ma'loul, that lovingly recreates every 55 building in the former village. People find their former homes on the fresco, then on the day of the picnic attempt to locate th em by the _^ placement of olive trees and cacti. Official history wo uld deny that ® the village existed at all, and even enlists nature in its support: at © the edge of the overgrown territory that once was Ma'loul, a plaque o declares it to be "Balfour Forest" (after th e 1917 Balfour Declaration, ^ which initiated the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Pales- t? tine). Khleifi's film allows all these different orders of history and q§ CD memory to approach each other asymptotically, to give sound and image to memories that cannot be witnessed by the historical site. Cinema as Expression of Collective Emergence
Deleuze's formulation of a notion of political cinema, repeated often throughout his writings, is this: "If there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet" (1989, 216). According to Deleuze, while the prewar Soviet and American cinema had a certain confidence that the "masses" they represent did in fact exist, postwar political cinema reached an im passe in the discovery that ther e is no revolutionary proletariat or other collective entity for it to represent. If such an organized force exists in the postwar period, it is already inscribed in modern politi cal institutions, already in discourse. As I have suggested, identity politics depends strategically on the recognition of ethnic, national, gender, and other affiliations in order for these groups to take part in established political debates. Yet it tends to be the people who slip bet ween the cracks of identity politics' categorizations that stir up political ferment. A contemporary political cinem a must be sought in the temporary nodes of struggle where people are just beginning to find their voices. We can pinpoint these struggles to the very sites where a people's existence is denied: "The moment the master, or the colonizer, pro claims There have never been people here,'" Deleuze writes, "the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns or in camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute" (1989, 217; also see Rodowick 1996, chapter 6). Indeed, keeping Foucault's criterion of visibility in mind, we may expect people to be "inventing them-
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selves" best wh en official discourse has explained th em squarely away: as extinct, picturesque, rioters, terrorists, shopkeepers, model minorities. Such discourses inc lud e the World War II patriotic musicals that emblematize who is "American enough" (in History and Memory); the French newspape rs' red uction of Zaire's struggle for political autonomy to intertribal disputes (in Lumumba); the ethnographic footage that ren der s the Bontoc people picturesque savages (in Bontoc Eulogy). A political cine ma is characterized by gaps and silences, the sites of emergence from these smug, sedimented dis courses. Not only is the historical archive available primarily to the victors, but also it is often those in the lan d of the victors wh o have access to a culture lost by the vanquished. Hence the paradoxical ability of Western (or dominant cultures') activists to document atrocities that cannot be visualized, that are unavailable, to the people who suffered them. For example, when Jon Alpert travels to Iraq to docu ment Saddam Speaks (1993), he has access, with his protected pas sage and camera crew, to sites and spectacles that no Middle East ern filmmaker could capture. The images of the destruction of Iraq, suppressed during the war by both Iraqi and mainstream Western press and only hinted at by the left-wing Western press, are finally recorded by Alpert: the razed homes, the unequ ipped hospitals, the starving infants that are the civilian casualties of the Allied em bargo. Yet images of the exile's country are less available to th e exile than to anyone else because he or she knows them to be myths of an unattainable past (Toufic 1996, 68-72). Monuments carried off to Western museums can only be painful reminders of the expropria tion of an exile's cult ure. Literary works like The Thousand and One Nights (Pasolini's Arabian Nights, 1974) and traditional myths like the Korean Tale ofKieu (Trinh's A Tale of Love, 1995) may signify a rich cultural heritage to outsiders, but to those to whom this heritage belongs they signify the irrevocable loss of the past. Thus it is impor tant for many postcolonial and exile filmmakers not to attempt to represent their cult ure in a (mythical) former state of wholeness, for that would be speaking in the language of the colonizers who have untroubled access to these artifacts. Postcolonial stories must be told both by sympathetic people from the colonizing country, who have access to rich image archives (for example, Alpert's Saddam Speaks; Tom Hayes's People and the Land, 1996, about the Pales-
vj. Still from Credits Included: A Video in Green and Red
tinians; Dee Dee Halleck's The Gringo in Mahanaland, 1995, about the Latin American countries colonized by the United States) and by the colonized, whose archives are much slimmer. When postcolonial filmmakers make difficult, hard-to-read works, they are not simply trying to frustrate the viewer, but to acknowledge the fact that the most important things that happened are invisible and unvisuahzable. Toufic's Credits Included: A Video in Green and Red (1995) is a maddening work, because throughout it presents the destruction, homelessness, and insanity that the Lebanese "civil" war produced, without suggesting any possibility of a return to nor mal life or normal speech. The tape isfilled with recollection-images that are forever stranded, refusing to be redeemed by the memory of one who would make sense of them. The videomaker draws a par allel between the destroyed buildings of Beirut and the men who lost their minds living in a southern Lebanon village that was con stantly shelled by the Israelis. Madness, Credits Included suggests, is not only the most logical way to respond to war: madness is also an image of ruin, an image that cannot be connected to memory. The refusal to connect images to memory is especially marked in a number of works by diasporan Lebanese and Palestinian film makers. This would seem to be a response to the lack of sympathy for their struggles in the West, and the knowledge that the offi cial histories of Lebanon and Palestine are especially intractable. Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argu-
18 and 19. Stills from Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) for oneself...
Speaking
Speaking for others. Courtesy of V Tape.
ment) Speaking for oneself . . . Speaking for others (1990), by Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman, laments the impossibility of speaking as an Arab, particularly a Palestinian, whe n one is already so utterly spoken for in Western contexts (see Marks 1992). The tape is a jar ring pastiche of images of Arabs borrowed from American movies, cartoons, and television news. In Salloum's tape This Is Not Beirut U994) > most of the images are public and street scenes of Beirut, bu t the videomaker uses a battery of techniques to prevent them from signifying the city, or signifying much at all. Many shots are taken from a speeding car; jump cuts obliterate objects just coming into view and abort dialogue in midsentence. The effect is jarring and frustrating, and it effectively blocks the stereotype that automati-
20. Still from This Is Not Beirut
cally links the adjective "war-torn" with the noun "Lebanon." More than an antiportrait of Beirut, the tape is a meditation on political representation. The desire to describe a political situation, and the tendency to founder in the act, are captured in a shot of the hands of Walid Ra'ad (Salloum's collaborator on Talaeen ajunuub) sketch ing an immensely complicated chart of the political relation s among the various people they are interviewing. Paralysis, the literal inability to translate affection into action, is expressed in the bodies of both film and actor in two works by Elia Suleiman. In Homage by Assassination (1992), the Palestinian char acter ES (played by the filmmaker) is waiting out the Gulf War in his New York apartment, while reports of the war clamor from the television. ES is a person whose actions have no consequences. He does not or cannot speak, though he uses the communicative prostheses of computer, photocopier, and fax: his body itself is incapable of expression. The film begins with a radio announcer's repeated attempts to reach the "young Palestinian filmmaker ,, on the phone for an interview: each time ES picks up the receiver, the connection fails. ES begins to doubt his own physical existence; he steps repeat edly onto a scale, trying to register his weight. He doesn't even have the strength to piss standing up. When one's existence is as incon sequential in the world as that of a Palestinian in New York during the Gulf War, one's perceptions cease to extend into action. ES be comes a character of pure affect. In one scene that lasts an eternity, he stands at the stove watching a pot of milk boil over.
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Suleiman as actor intercedes for Suleiman the director again in his feature film, Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996). The film is set largely in Nazareth, where his parents live. As the title suggests, it measures the gradual disappearance, following the Oslo Agreement, of Palestinian identity and agency in Israel. It has a relatively (for Suleiman) lively plot, involving a Palestinian woman who finds a walkie-talkie of the Israeli police and uses it to issue confounding directions to the cops (there's even a gun, though it turns out to be a cigarette lighter); bu t the ma in sense of the film is of passivity, in-fighting (reflecting the corruption of the newly established Pales tinian Authority), and paralysis. Suleiman again plays the unnamed protagonist, who again is bo th m ute and utterly ineffectual through out the film. He keeps a friend company in a souvenir shop that re mai ns unvisited all day long, its postcard rack squeaking in the slight breeze. In another recurring scene, a car screeches to a halt in front of a gas station, two Arab men get out and start to beat each other up, and the service station attendants mu st break up the fight before they kill each other. It is as though time is in a rut: going forward is impossible, so actions are repeated, like music on a scratched vinyl record. At one point Israeli commandoes burst into his apartment and muscle around with guns, apparently searching for a suspect. Our protagonist pads around after them in his bathrobe, but they do not seem to notice him. Later, on the stolen walkie-talkie, he hears their exhaustive inventory of the apartment's contents, which con cludes, "And a guy in a bathrobe." As in Homage by Assassination, his presence is incapable of extending into action. Yet this prohi bition from participating in events allows the character, and us the viewers, to perceive events in their absurdity and tenderness, as well as their injustice. The film's last shot fondly records the film maker's aging parents, fast asleep in front of the television as pro gramming signs off for the night, the Israeli national anthem playing over a fluttering flag. There is a sense of exhaustion and failure, a terrible disillusionment in the brief hopes for Palestinian autonomy. Are "the people" of Palestine still emerging, or has the foundering of the nationalist struggle left them with less than before? Intercultural cinema is constituted around a particular crisis: the directly political discrepancy between official history and "private" memory. Deleuze describes such a crisis in European and North American cinema as well. Here, however, the terms of the crisis
21 and 22. Frame enlargements from Chronicle of a Disap
pearance. Courtesy of Aska Films.
are more existential—the helplessness of Antonioni's and Godard's characters confronting strange industrial and commercial land scapes, for example; or the free-floating perception that character izes the films of North American structuralist filmmakers, such as Michael Snow and Ken Jacobs. These latter films, Deleuze argues, formulate a sort of gaseous perception, comparable to the experi ence of being on drugs (Deleuze 1986, 84) in that they free percep tion from subjectivity. Gaseous perception, as individualistic as a drug-induced hallucination, floats free from interested, subjective perception. Much exper imental cinema affords this sort of indi vidual temporal exploration, including some of the films and videos I discuss in this book (such as the formally experimental work of
Seoungho Cho and Garine Torossian). But what generally charac terizes intercultural cinema (and also, for example, some feminist experimental film and video) is that it uses experimental means to arouse collective memories. Perception in such works is not just an individual exploration but socially and historically specific: it em bodies a collective expression even as it is highly personal. Since it is participatory and culturally informed, Deleuze's theory of cinematic perception could be extended into a theory of collective reception. Deleuze does acknowledge that some forms of knowledge are collective, notably that of the storyteller. "Story-telling is not an impersonal myth, but neither is it a personal fiction: it is a word in act, a speech-act through which the character continually crosses the boundary which would separate his private business from poli tics, and which itself produces collective utterances" (1989, 222). However, when discussing perception itself, Deleuze tends to sug gest that individual perception is possible without recourse to col lective memory. In contrast, I argue that the element of communal experience that is implicit in Bergson's theory of perception neces sarily informs the process of cinematic spectatorship as well. Per ception is never a pur ely individual act but also an engagement with the social and with cultural memory. "Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past" (Benjamin 1968a, 157). As Teshome Gabriel points out, the process of viewing a film, especially a minority film, underscores the collective character of its form of expression: "There is a significant continuity between forms of oral tradition and ceremonial story-telling and the struc tures of reception of Third Cinema. This continuity consists of a sharing of responsibility in the construction of the text, where both the filmmaker and the spectators play a double role as performers and creators" (1989, 62). This collective process, I argue, takes place in all film viewing and is simply more explicit, and more motivated, in intercultural cinema, which is motivated to use individual stories to represent collective histories. Minority cinema makes it clear, by virtue of its critical relationship to dominant languages, that no utterance is individual. Let me draw upon critiques of Bergson in order to refashion some of Deleuze's ideas about film, memory, and the social. Bergson's notion of duree, or duration, which is central to Deleuze's theory of
time-image cinema, dep ends up on a per son experiencing the pas- 63 sage of time. As both Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas pointed out, however, Bergson elides the fact that this experience ends in the _a individual's death. "Bergson in his conception of the duree has be- ^ come ... estranged from history," Benjamin writes. "The duree from a> which death has been eliminated has the miserable endlessness of o a scroll. Tradition has been excluded from it" (1968a, 185). Levinas 0 too notes that, in its focus on individual perception, Bergson's was ty a "deathless philosophy," for time is not merely duration as experi- era enced by the individual, but an endless opening onto mystery. "The w very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future. It seems to me impossible to speak of time in a subject alone, or to speak of a purely personal duration" (1989, 46, 44). The sense of endlessness and estrangement these writers attribute to Bergson's theory of duration seems distinctly to describe the sort of modern ist films that Deleuze tends to privilege. Their sense of alienation is expressed in individual terms and afforded individual, existen tial solutions (though a vague political movement is often on the horizon). Such works actualize the experience of the duree by not permitting images to extend into action, by cutting off all causal relationships. The wandering character of an Antonioni film "has gained in an ability to see what he has lost in action or reaction: he SEES so that the viewer's problem becomes 'What is there to see in the image?' (and not now 'What are we going to see in the next image?')" (Deleuze 1989, 272). Characters in intercultural cinema wander and contemplate, too, as we have seen. But their individual uncharted journeys are more likely, ultimately, to evoke some kind of common struggle. To raise the stakes of the optical image, we might ask what's the point of "finally SEEING" if there's nothing to see? What's the point of having our cliches and preconceptions blo wn by the intensity of t he time-image experience if we have no subsequent course of action? Might there be a more pressing pur pose to this act of suspension—such as the claiming of collective experience? To answer this, I want to return to an exploration of the idea of memory, in a critique more of the Bergsonian roots of Deleuze's philosophy than of Deleuze's philosophy itself. Memory is more like a minefield (or bed of fossils) than like the limpid reflecting pool that Bergson describes. Bergson is too sanguine about an indi-
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vi du ars ability to partake in the fullness of experience, moving back and forth between the circuits of perception and recollection with ever-increasing satisfaction, as though at some great phenomenological buffet table. He cannot acknowledge the traumatic effect of memory. Bergson's pure memory is unconscious, not in the psycho analytic sense but in the sense that it is latent until called upo n in action. Proust, however, changed the term to voluntary memory [memoire volontaire), or rem emb ran ce, and added a notion of involuntary memory [memoire involontaire), whi ch Benjamin, in turn, called simply memory (1968a, 157-58). Involuntary memory cannot be called up at will but must be brought on by a "shock"— whether this be the fragrance of the madeleine Proust dunked in his cup of tea or, for Deleuze, the assault of the optical image upon the immobilized viewer. Unlike remembrance, Benjamin wrote, (invol untary) memory aims not to protect impressions but to disintegrate them (1968a, 159-60). Remembrance actually shields consciousness from experience. Remembrance is thu s very mu ch like the b uilt-up layers of virtual images that compose official history. In contrast, memory, one might say, deterritorializes remembrance. It takes a shock to unroot a memory, to revive a flow of experience. Such a shock is what Deleuze looks for in time-image cinema. What you "SEE," then, in the suspension of motor extension, is a little closer to the repressed collective contents of memory than simply a phenomenological Thereness. Experience, as Benjamin (1968b) argued, necessarily involves a connection with the social character of mem ory, and this connection is increasingly difficult to make where the social character of public life has been undermined. In such circum stances collective memory comes as a shock. Intercultural cinema shows that this process of reconnecting experience with the social is often traumatic. When the recollection-image is connected to memory, when the stories can finally be told, a film shifts from time-image to move ment-image. Such are the mom ents w hen Tajiri is finally able to cre ate an image that captures her mother's memory of imprisonment, or wh en Peck tentatively assigns an image to Lumumba's mysterious death. At these moments there is a great feeling of relief—a relief that is often audible in the audience. The moments when memory returns and stories can finally be told are moments when a collec tive begins to find its voice. Later, perh aps , these newfound stories
will harden into discourses of identity; but for the moment they are cause for celebration.
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Powers of the False
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People whose lives are built in the movement between two or more cultures are necessarily in the process of transformation. The ex pression of this experience is impossible not only within hegemonic discourse, but also wit hin any single cultural regime of knowledge.
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What Deleuze calls "powers of the false" in the cinema are at work when there is no single point that can be referred to as real or true. Recall that in the forking model of time, of present-that-passes and past-preserved, there can be no objective record of the past. The past is preserved among various discursive strata that confront each other with incommensurable truths. Actual and virtual images are constituted around the splitting of time, and their indiscernibility, the inability to designate either as the true image, constitutes the powers of the false. Such a complex of indiscernible images he calls a "crystal-image": the original point at which actual and vir tual image reflect each other produces, in turn, a widening circuit of actual and virtual images like a hall of mirrors. When a film re flects upon its own production process, its obstacles, and the very cost of its making, it acts as this sort of catalytic crystal, reflecting the film-that-could-have-been in the complex of its virtual images (Deleuze 1989, 76). Many of the films I have discussed, including Calendar, Lumumba, History and Memory, Bontoc Eulogy, Talaeen a Junuub, The Watermelon Woman, and nume rous works by Black
Audio, are constructed around the setbacks that block their pro duction—the canceled interviews, the amnesiac interviewees, the censored images, the destruction of real archives. All the events that prevent the production of images stimulate circuits of mem ory. These points across which virtual and actual regard each other function as fossils, preserving the "radioactive" quality of the origi nal contact rather than explain and resolve it. Cinematic archaeology is not a question of exhuming the "authen tic voice" of a minority people—for that would be a unitary voice. And, in fact, it would simply replicate the transparent domination by which a minority is forced to speak in a minority voice. The intercultural artist must undo a double colonization, since the com-
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munity is colonized both by the master's stories and by its own. It is tempting for exiles to fetishize images of homeland in the melancholic longing for an irrecoverable past. Hamid Naficy suggests that the pain of exile, as well as the fact of censorship, moves politi cal expression into other registers in what is a basically fetishistic process. The question is whether this shift merely freezes a lost cultural experience in fetishized form, or facilitates the ultimately defetishizing process of cultural transformation (Naficy 1993,130-47). To fetishize the authenticity of one's traditional culture plays into notions that minority cultures can be packaged in easily consumable signs. It reduces the volatile process of memory to the sedimenting process of remembrance. The photographer in Calendar, for ex ample, begins as a packager of culture: he buys into the fetishized notion of what is Armenian, slotting the photographs of churches into the kno wn quantity of calendarishness, while valiantly repress ing the efforts of his images to speak. Many documentaries, as well as fiction works, about minority history assume that there is an intact oral history out there waiting to be tapped, recorded, and proffered to a community. While such work is important, it assumes that a his tory can be unproblematically reconstructed. The makers of intercultural cinema, by contrast, destroy myths from the inside. They do this not by extracting a truth from their traditional culture but by evoking the myth of culture as a necessary fiction. Watching Bontoc Eulogy, one gradually realizes that Fuentes's ancest ral tale could not be true: the history is too far lost ever to be reconstructed. As the end credits reveal, even "his" adorable children are impostors (they are performing magic tricks in the film, which should tip us off). These are powers of the false at work: the painful effect of recover ing a lost history is still there, but it becomes all the more powerful becau se it cannot be reduced to Marlon Fuentes's private story. The powers of the false only undermine the hegemonic character of official images, cliches, and other totalizing regimes of knowl edge. They do not privilege some other experience as truth. John Akomfrah advocates such a refusal to adopt a discourse of truth when he criticizes the imperative that Black artists submit to par ticular political ends: People assume that there are certain transcendental duties that Black film making has to perform. . . . Because it is in a state of emergence its means
23. Frame enlargement from Bontoc Eulogy
always have to be guerrilla means, war means, signposts of urgency When that begins to inhibit questions of reflection—doubt, skepticism, intimacy and so on—then the categorical imperative does exactly what it is supposed to do—it imprisons, (in Fusco 1988b, 51) These words describe the relationship that Tajiri, Fuentes, Peck, and other intercultural filmmakers have with their communities: rather than furnish anthems to solidarity or cheering fictions, they are fun damentally falsifiers, enabling political transformation only by re fusing to adhere to a given political agenda. As Robert Reid-Pfarr (1993) has pointed out, a Black community leader like Malcolm X, safely dead, can be elevated to sainthood. Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992) showed that canonization is only a step from commodification, by creating a teleological Malcolm whose life is validated in the context of official history. Black Audio, in contrast, uses the figures of Malcolm X (in Seven Songs for Malcolm X, 1993) a n d Michael X to falsify history. Rather than appeal to a pre-existing community, Black Audio's films invent a place where African diasporic people come into being. Thus they appeal not to an identity but to the conditions of politi cal transformation. A precise form of political struggle is involved in recognizing that "the primal encounters that are our fantasies of a national history will never be validated by official British history" (in Fusco 1988b, 51). To call these moments "primal encounters" suggests that Black Audio knows them to be fictions, enabling fie-
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tions at the foundation of identity. As such, Who Needs a Heart?, like many of their other works, is a fabulation, a necessary fiction pro duc ed wh en recorded history is unavailable or useless. The agents of intercultural cinema are what Deleuze calls "intercessors," real characters who mak e up fiction. These are not the docile informants of documentary, but resistant characters who dispu te the filmmaker's construction of tr ut h at every turn: Jean Rouen's characters with their own stories to tell, Trinh's evasive interlocutors. As David MacDougall points out, the subjects who are most likely to collaborate with documentary filmmakers are those who have agendas of their own. They may be unusually "enquiring of mind," marginal to the community, or already in an intermediary position between community and explorers from outside, but in any case their agendas exceed and transform those of the filmmaker (1994, 32). The inter cultural filmmaker mobilizes the stories of these opinionated tellers against official versions of history in absurd or poignant pairings, crystal images th at falsify the official story while respecting the partial views of the intercessors. The political stakes of intercession are especially clear in Salloum and Ra'ad's Talaeen a Junuub (1993). This video deals with the near-impossibility of re p resenting the Lebanese political situation to outsiders, particularly to North Americans, given the way "Lebanon" is circumscribed by North Amer ican political interests and cultural expectations. It is composed almost entirely of interviews with numerous Lebanese political and cultural figures, who are not identified, in a refusal of talking-head authority. One woman in particular refuses outright to discuss her opinions on tape. "I know you will only use my words to make your own point," she says (in Arabic, translated in subtitles). "Even my refusal to speak you will use as part of your argument." By frustrating the videomakers' attempts to mobilize their opinions (with, one suspects, the videomakers ' willing consent), the interces sors of Talaeen a Junuub delaminate the notion of balanced report age that is a trope of official history. Fuentes creates an intercessor in his fictional ancestor Marcot in Bontoc Eulogy, using his tale to splinter the history of benign colonial annexation of the Philippines by the United States. Many intercultural works, given their uncertain position between docu mentary and fiction, position the artist him/herself as intercessor. In The Perfumed Nightmare (1978), Kidlat Tahimik creates a nimble
24. Frame enlargement from Seven Songs for Malcolm X.
Courtesy of Black Audio Film Collective.
25. Still from Talaeen ajunuub. Courtesy of V Tape.
intercessor in his fictional counterpart: Kidlat, the President of the Werner von Braun Fan Club of his Filipino village of Balian. He writes to NASA to ask what were Neil Armstrong's first words on the moon, and duly receives a reply. He opens it excitedly before the assembled young members of the club and reads the English words with difficulty. "That's one — small — step for man, one — gee-ant — leap f o r . . . man-kind [rhymes with banking]." In his role as inter cessor, the uncomprehending Kidlat brings down the lofty global imperialism of NASA with one inspired mispronunciation.
26. Production still from The Perfumed Nightmare.
Courtesy of Flower Films.
Storytelling crosses and recrosses between private life and poli tics, making the boundary between them impossible to locate. As Benjamin suggests, storytellers' knowledge is of a different order from that which passes as official information. As "the communicability of experience decreases," as official knowledge diverges from community experience (or vice versa), the storyteller's practi cal information becomes increasingly rare and precious (Benjamin 1968b, 84-87). Old people are thus repositories of virtual images; their death is like the loss of a past-that-is-preserved. Their stories, again, are like those "radioactive fossils" that cannot be explained in terms of the geological layer on which they are found. In History and Memory, the intercessor is Tajiri's amnesiac mother, whose memory consists only somatically, in the pain caused by de nial and in the memory of water. Her forgetting forces her daugh ter, the videomaker, to go digging herself, make up stories, indeed become a surrogate rememberer. From a few virtual images Tajiri is able to fabulate a story through the telling of which the family re gains their memory and the filmmaker herself achieves an identity Tajiri reconstitutes herself, as well as the community of Japanese Americans whose story of imprisonment was historically erased, in the process of looking for her mother's memories and the collective memories they metonymize. A double becoming takes place in all works of intercultural cinema, where individual memories are fal-
sified in order to represent the unr epresentable history of the community. Radioactive Recollection Images
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As I have suggested, some of the most powerful images these works create are recollection-images, images that, while they do not correspond to any person's memory, cry out to tell the forgotten histories of which they are the index. Tajiri's investigation of the silent ob-
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jects that witnessed the inter nment—a little carved bird, a scrap of tar paper—is one example of reconstituting memories from recol lection-images. The ethnographic footage of the mourning women in Bontoc Eulogy, and the newsreel footage of the Caribbean women disembarking in Handsworth Songs, are material artifacts of these women's presence that call to have the memory coaxed from them. In Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, a modest piece of okra is a rec ollection image of the Gullah people's African history. It is brought into a slim connection wit h the present by the grandmother who r e members its African name, but it is the filmmaker's task to make th e connection explicit. Not only visual images, but many things can be recollection-images: a song, a time-traveling object, an evoca tive but unnameable smell, a texture—as in Calendar, when Ashot's question, "Don't you want to touch and feel the churches?" suggests that by calling upon a sense knowledge that cannot be reproduced, namely touch, he can make the churches communicate their his tory. And Who Needs a Heart? draws upon memories inspired by music, by color, by the smell of incense and the feel of fabric. Like memories, images are multisensory, and cinema uses its audiovisual means to build images around memories. In the follow ing chapters I will examine other ways that intercultural cinema works to reassign histories to these mute objects and unrepresent able senses: to pair the song with a picture, the smell with a sound, the texture with a memory. The knowledges to which these sense memories appeal are not simply instrumental, ready to be trans lated into verbal information. That translation may take place, but the residual nonverbal knowledges remain a bodily repository that can only be understood in its own terms. Many of the films and videos I discuss in this chapter appear to deflect overt political issues into matters of personal reminiscence,
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27. Frame enlargement from Calendar. Photo: Atom Egoyan. Courtesy of
Alliance Atlantis Communications.
poetic audiovisual images, and style. Moments of crisis seem to occur when the image is the thinnest, when there is the least avail able to represent. These works tend to be most powerfully moving— often bringing viewers to tears—at these points where the image reaches exhaustion: where there is only voice-over without picture, as in History and Memory; or image with the dialogue muffled, as in Who Needs a Heart?, or low-resolution audio- and videotape of a lost loved one played over and over, in Calendar, or a delicate draw ing standing in for an atrocity, in Lumumba. I believe this response is partly caused by the intensity of a contradictory emotional response to the erasure of the dominant cultural imaginary^ stock images. This response might be relief that the pressure of these images has been lifted—a pres sure of which one might not have been aware, like wearing shoes that are too small. It may be dread of what n ew images and histories might flow in. Or it may be exhilaration, for the same reason. Of course, responses will vary according to the relationship the viewer has with the dominant stock images. Yet in any case the awareness that an empty space has been cleared into which new cultural imaginings may flow carries a powerful emotional charge. The emotional response is also in part a reaction to the way these works shift knowledge to different registers. Deleuze's film theory
points to the incommensurability between t h e visual a n d th e ver - 73 bal: b u t the se films a n d vid eos suggest tha t ther e exist still other, less easily recorded a n d code d, orders that nevert hel ess leave thei r _g traces in the audiovisual media of film a n d video. These might b e ® CD termed t h e sensible, or even t h e spiritual.
Recall that for Bergson "image" is not simply the visual image, bu t the complex of all sense impressions that a perceived object conveys to a perceiver at a given mome nt ([1911] 1988, 36-38). Thus images are always both multisensory a n d embodied. Pure memory
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does not exist in the body, but it is in the body that memory is activated, calling up sensations associated with the remembered event ([1911] 1988,179). Bergson's insistence on the carnality of memory is crucial. Yet, as I will argue in chapter 3, he still assigns only a cir cumscribed role to the body in memory. Bergson underv alues bodily memory because he assumes that memory can be easily actualized when necessary, not acknowledging the individual and social pro hibitions on the actualization of memory. In contrast, I argue that memory involves not simply the activation of "pure memory," nor only the bucking up of the individual unconscious, but the traces of collective life that inform the structure of perception. In later chap ters I will examine in detail how cultural life informs the memory of the body, in ways that Bergson anticipated but undervalued. For Deleuze, however, the time-image cinema does not abandon the body. Indeed, it is in the moments that the body is freed to its own gestures that perception is freed from the usua l ro und of action, enabling us to think anew. "Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to thin k what is con cealed from thought, life" (1989,189). A certain kind of time-image, then, is both experienced in the body and invites a direct experi ence of time. Deleuze writes that experimental cinema rediscovers the body: both the everyday and th e ceremonial body (1989,191-92). As we have seen, the everyday body, exhausted to the point wh ere it cannot go on, opens cinema to the time-image in the work of Tajiri, Suleiman, Egoyan, and others. As Deleuze noted with regard to French impressionist cinema (1986, 40- 45), those affection images that occur in any-spaces-whatever lead to sublimation; to contem plation, rather than the reaction of movement. It is a bodily contem plation, however, not a purely intellectual response. The affectionimages of these works invite a bodily response—a shudder, perh aps,
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as Raoul Peck quietly describes the murder; grief at the sight of the silent mourning women of Bontoc Eulogy; agitation as Mathisoris sax drowns out the dialogue in Who Needs a Heart?— but they do not extend into movement as usual. Rather they are located among irrational cuts, black screens, divergent image and sound, and other time-image devices that invite continued, embodied contemplation. The affection-image, the n, is the domain of what Deleuze calls the ceremonial cinema. The ceremonial body in intercultural films and videos is intro duced at the moment when all other action has become impossible. Ritual connects individual experience with collective experience, activating collective memory in the body. In an overwhelming num ber of these works, the search for memory images turns out to be a process of collective mourning: of ritual. Some of these rituals are overtly staged as such: Reece Auguiste's Mysteries of July (1991), for example, is structured around a vigil for young Black men who died in police custody. Tania Cypriano's Ex-Voto (1990) is a video performed as a ritual of thanks to Nossa Senhora da Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil, for sparing her life in a terrible fire: she offers flowers and lights candles to the video camera as though at a shrine. Paul Wong's Chinaman's Peak: Walking the Mountain (1995) is a mourning ritual, performed for the camera, for his lover who died. Zachery Longboy's water into fire (1993) is also a ritual to acknowl edge the destruction that AIDS has wrought in his community: but, as rituals do, it draws strength from loss and from his faith in the life springing from the earth. The three women of Who Needs a Heart? perform rituals twice, once in jest and once in earnest. In an early scene, the three stage a scene in Millie's film: "After the I-Ching Naomi, Faith and I discover Africa." Naomi holds up a string of cowrie shells for Faith to kiss, like a rosary; Faith kisses it and then laughingly pulls it into her mouth; Millie, angry, bursts into tears. Later, after the news of Michael X's execution, Faith's lover Louis kills himself. The two black women support the body of Louis's white lover as she sobs; they burn incense around her head; and Naomi bends Faith's head down to kiss the coffin. These momen ts of intimacy between the women are memorable both for their unholy mingling of sacred and sensual acts and for the sense that through ritual they are founding a body at least as powerful as, and perhaps subversive of, the armed strength of the film's male radicals. 5
28. Still from Chinaman's Peak: Walking the Mountain.
Courtesy of Video Out.
2g. Still from water into fire. Courtesy of Video Out.
Shauna Beharry's Seeing Is Believing (1991), as I discuss in the next chapter, was made as an act of grieving for the artist's mother, who died once physically and once again in the inability of photo graphs to represent her. Similarly, works like Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet, History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, Bontoc Eulogy, The Way to My Father's Village, and Looking for Langston
honor and mourn the filmmakers' wandering ghosts, as their titles suggest. Calendar, Siskyavi, Homage by Assassination, and many other works wring a collective grief from individual stories. The
30. Frame enlargement from Who Needs a Heart?
optical images that represent lost lives and vanished histories en gender a cry to the heavens, a hymn to the ancestors, a memorial to all that was destroyed in the histories of colonial subjugation and official forgetting. And let us remember that rituals, including ritu als of mourning, are not final acts but beginnings. In Lumumba, Raoul Peck's wand erings through endless airport corridors seem to displace the deep grief about the murder of a great leader and the deferral of African democracy onto a bodily sensa tion of repetition and numbness. In Bontoc Eulogy, the grief of an anonymous mourner in an antique ethnographic film elicits a simi lar emotion in the body of the viewer. In Calendar, the protagonist's willful loss of contact with his beloved and his culture of origin are expressed in the tactile opacity of low-grade video. In Who Needs a Heart?, information about Black struggles in Britain is withheld only to re-emerge, like secrets whispered into ears of corn, in a susurration of music and color. In History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, the vivid sensory image of filling a canteen with cool water is all that remains of four years of imprisonment. These are not simple acts of displacement: they also reveal knowledge that has been stored only in the memory of the body. When the verbal and visual archives are silent, information is revealed that was never verbal or visual to begin with.
2 The memory of things
[The past is] somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which one it is. As for that object, it depends entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way This chapter examines films and videos that excavate memories from objects. Movements through space and time can be read in the image; movement among cultures, like the passage of time, creates disjunctive, illegible images. These images are all a particular kind of recollection-image, which I term the recollection-object: an irreducibly material object that encodes collective memory. They can in addition be variously considered fetishes, fossils, and transna tional objects. What is important about all these object-images is that they condense time within themselves, and that in excavating them we expand outward in time. To continue to use Deleuzian termi nology, wh en an image surfaces from another place, another cultur e, it disrupts the coherence of the plane of the present culture. When Deleuze writes, "The present itself exists only as an infinitely con tracted past which is constituted at the extreme point of the alreadythere" (1989, 98), the words "infinitely contracted past" seem to describe the souvenir object, that stubborn survivor from another place-time that brings its volatile contents to the present. An object in a film or tape is a particular sort of recollection-image that calls up
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different pasts past s fo forr different different peop pe ople. le. Where Whe re Citizen Citiz en Kane had ha d Rose bu b u d , Rea Tajiri h as a woo wo o d e n bir b irdd , S h au n a Beha Be harr rryy a silk sil k sar s ari, i, Victor Masayesva a stolen kachin kac hinaa mask: objects objects whose who se incommen incom mensur surable able pasts past s are the pr prod oduct uct not only of person per sonal al history histor y bu butt of intercul inte rcultura turall displac dis placemen ement. t. The heirloom, heirl oom, the th e souvenir, the mass-manufactu mass-man ufactured red object object contain cont ain differen differentt and incomm inc ommens ensura urable ble stories of ownersh own ership, ip, fantasy, fantasy, and an d labor depe de pend ndin ingg on who wh o looks at these th ese objects. Intercu Int erculltural tur al cinema often often takes things thing s fo forr its images, presents pres ents them in all their thei r fossil-l fossil-like ike strangenes stran geness, s, and sometime some times, s, by reconnect reco nnecting ing them th em with their past, neutralizes their disturbing power. Objects that travel along paths of human diaspora and inter national trade encode cultural displacement. Even commodities, though tho ugh they the y are subject subject to the deracinati der acinating ng flow flow of of the transnatio trans national nal economy and the censoring process of official history, retain the po p o w e r to tell te ll t h e stor st orie iess of wh w h e r e the th e y hav ha v e bee b eenn . I nter nt ercu cull tur tu r a l cin ci n ema moves through space, gathering up histories and memories that are lost or covered over in the movement of displacement, and pro ducing new knowledges out of the condition of being between cul tures. To coin another term, by adapting D. W. Winnicott's theory of the th e transiti tran sitional onal object, object, they can be considere consi dered d transnational objects. The transitional object is any external object that a person partially incorporates in the process of reorganizing its subjectivity (Winnicott [1951] 1958). So it seems useful to suggest that "transnational object" might describe the objects that are created in cultural trans lation and transcultural movement. Many important films focus on the traffic in people. Some of these people may also be classified as "transnational objects," in that they are traded like commodities be b e t w e e n n ati at i on onss as refu re fuge gees es,, gu gues estt wor wo r k ers, er s, "comfo "co mfort rt wom wo m en" en " a n d other sex workers, or the vast vast undo cum ent ed workforce workforce that under pi p i n s in i n t e r n a t i o n al comm co mmer erce ce.. 1 Needles Need lesss to say say,, films films and a nd tapes tap es about abou t traveling workers are themselves only a fraction of the vast num ber be r s of wor wo r ks t h a t trac tr acee t h e m o v e m e n t of imm im m igr ig r ants an ts an d exil ex iles es,, resulting in transformations at least as fundamental for the nation to which these people travel as for the people themselves. What I focus focus on in this chap c hapter ter is a subgenre subge nre of what wha t has been called tra ns national independent cinema (Naficy 1994; Zimmermann and Hess 1 997)- If that genre focuses primarily on the diasporic movements of immigrants and exiles, these works excavate the traces left by things that "emigrate" due to similar global flows of capital, power,
and desire. If the th e highhig h-spe speed ed torr to rren entt of inform inf ormatio ationn and an d capital capi tal is a 79 relentless tide, then most of the movements to which this chapter is devoted are und ercu rrents rre nts,, carried with the tide bu t moving against against H it, or eddies created aroun aro undd idiosyncrati idiosy ncraticc points poi nts in the flow flow.. ® As in the th e previo pre vious us chapter, chapte r, most of of my examples examp les in this th is chapte chap terr CD are docume doc umenta ntary ry film filmss and videos. Document Docu mentarie ariess claim the privi- o leged position of representing reality. Consequently, it is especially 0 pres pr essi sing ng for t h e m to expl ex plai ainn t h e tran tr ansf sfor orma mati tion onss a n d disa di sart rtic icul ulaa- H tions of reality un der de r the pressu pre ssures res of intercu int ercu ltural ltu ral mov ements eme nts.. But 5* more importantly for my purposes in this chapter, documentary's priv pr ivil ileg eged ed rela re lati tion on to t h e r eal ea l exte ex tenn ds to t h e mate ma terr ial ia l c o n n ect ec t i o n to the profilmic event itself—a basically fetishistic relationship, in the anthropological sense. This material and fetishistic quality of docu mentar men taryy will be the focus focus of the second se cond part p art of this chapter, chap ter, in whic wh ichh I discuss the work of Shauna Beharry, an artist who uses video but whose encompassing me dium di um is ritual and performance. Beharry is a third-generation Canadian of Indian descent whose work focuses on the loss of language and of cultural reference that happens with displacement, the paradox that she still carries cultural references in her body, and the sensuous sensu ous or spiritual spir itual experien expe riences ces that challenge translation. The stake of this exploration is to recognize the com plex pl exit ityy of t he feti fe tish shiz ized ed object obj ectss t h a t move mo ve b e t w e e n cu l t u r e s , h o w they are created, how they serve memory, and how they may selfdestruct when their usefulness is ended. Postcolonial cinema responds to colonial fetishism, or the seizing upon aspects of the colonized culture in order to maintain a con trolling distance from it, not only at the level of narrative content. These works also redeem fetishized objects by finding values in them that are unrecognized in the colonial context. They may show how the meaning of an object changes as it circulates in new con texts. They They may restore restor e the "radioactivity " of an object object that th at has ha s b een ee n sanitized or rendered inert through international trade. They may depict the object in such a way that it is protected from the fetishizing or commodifying gaze. Or they may propose a nonfetishizing form of looking, one that invites the "viewer" to experience the ob ject jec t no nott so m u c h visu vi sual ally ly as th t h r o u g h a bod b odil ilyy cont co ntac act. t. As well as the transnational object, I use models of the fetish and the fossil to describe how objects encode both the discursive shifts and the material conditions of displacement. Meaning, I will argue,
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is encode enc odedd in objects objects not metaphoric metap horically ally bu butt throug thr oughh physical con con tact. Following historians and theorists of gifts and commodities, I g suggest that tha t objects are not inert ine rt and mute mu te bu butt that tha t they the y tell stories E and an d descri des cribe be trajectories. trajectori es. Cinem Ci nemaa is capable capab le no nott only of following £ this process proce ss chronologically but also of discovering the value that 'o inheres inhe res in objects: objects: the discursive discurs ive layers that tha t take material mater ial for form m in ^ them, them , the unresolved unresolv ed traumas traum as that become embedded embe dded in them, and the history hist ory of material mater ial interactio inter actions ns that they encode. encode . I go on to ar0 H gue that cinema cine ma may be consider cons idered ed not a simula sim ulacru crum m bu butt a material artifact of transnational migration. This argument involves a recon sideration of the notion of aura as a way to talk about how objects encode social processes. Of the many theories of the fetish that operate in anthropology, Marxist analysis, analysi s, and psychoanalysis, psychoana lysis, I focus focus on o n those that explicitly attend to it in terms of a series of historical, intercultural displace ments. All fetishes are translations into a material object of some sort of affect; the fetish described by psychoanalysis in only one of these. Some objects embody memory as well as labor: theories of fetishism describe how a value comes to inhere in objects that is not reducible to commodiflcation. I will argue that intercultural re lations are necessarily fetishistic, although clearly fetishes are not necessarily intercultural. What I wish to gain by using both the terms fetish and an d fossil is to ffor orge ge a meeting meeti ng place betwe en Deleuze's an d Benjamin's Benjamin's particu partic u lar recollection-objects, recollection -objects, both bot h of of which wh ich trace tra ce part of their thei r meaning meani ng to Bergson. In this chapter I will often use only the term fetish. But in fact I wish to argue that the two terms are functionally similiar: or, at least, that the fetish works in the same way as the "radioactive fos sil," in Deleuze's casual term for a certain kind of cinematic image (198 (1 989, 9, 11 1133). To expl ex plai ainn this, thi s, let me define that th at cruci cr ucial al Benjam Ben jamini inian an term, aura. Benjamin wrote that aura is the quality in an object that makes our relationship to it like a relationship with another human being. It seems to look back at us (1968a, 188). Marx, and following him re luctantly, Benjamin, atte mpted mp ted to demystif demystifyy the th e fetishistic fetishistic character charact er of auratic objects by showing that they gained their power from the human presences and material practices that constructed them. I say "reluctantly" because Benjamin was unwilling to relinquish the po p o w e r of t h e aura au rati ticc object obj ect as an object obj ect.. It can ca n no nott b e r e d u c e d to a
narrative, narrativ e, as I will insist throug thr oughou houtt this chapter. chapter. Aura is the sense 81 an object gives that it can speak to us of the past, without ever let ting us completely completel y decipher deci pher it. It is a br us h wit h involuntar invol untaryy memme m- _a ory, or y, memory memo ry that can only be arrived at at thr oug h a shock. We retu re turn rn ® again and again to the th e auratic aura tic object, still st ill thir th irst styy (18 (1877, referr ref erring ing to CD Paul Valery), Valery), becaus bec ausee it can never nev er comple com pletely tely satis satisfy fy our desire desi re to o recover that memory. Hence the sense that an auratic object main0 tains its distance distan ce no matter how closely closely we embrace it: it: it is distant dist ant H from us in time even as it is present in space. Benjamin remained a & OQ Marxist in his insistence that the auratic character of things was not simply their ability to awaken awak en memories memor ies in an individual; individual ; not a "pre "pr e mature, merely private reconciliation with a fallen world" (Hansen 1987, 19 190) 0),, bu butt the th e reso re sonan nance ce of the th e reified social worl wo rldd in a frag frag ment. Auratic objects, then, are fragments of the social world that cannot be read from on high but only in the witness of the object. Benjamin's fetish and Deleuze's fossil have in common a disturb ing light, an eerily beckoning luminosity. In the fetish it is called aura, in the fossil it is called radioactivity. Aura is what makes the fetish fetish volatile, because becau se it incites us to memory memo ry withou wit houtt ever bringing memory back completely. Similarly, when a fossil is "radioactive" that is because becau se it hints th at the pas t it repres rep resent entss is not over, over, it it beck ons the viewer to excavate the past, even at his or her peril. Recollection-objects
Cinema treats the recollection-object as an especially "hard," op aque aqu e recollection-image. It confronts such initially inscrutable objects and attempts to read them by connecting them to memory. The works I discuss in this chapter document the process of translation by deco de codi ding ng t h e d i s p l acem ac emee n t s, a n d t h e soci so cial al rel r elat atio ionn s, t h a t ob objec jects ts carry within them. Many more or less narrative intercultural films use recollection-objects as part of the mise-en-scene, where they appear as mu te witnesses witne sses to a character' chara cter'ss history. In Martine Mart ine Attile's (198 988) 8),, fo forr examp ex ample, le, the British Britis h child chi ldre renn of of a Carib Carib Dreaming Rivers (1 be b e an w o m a n s tand ta nd at h er deat de athh bed be d , refl re flect ectin ingg u p o n t hei he i r m e m o r i e s of her. Whispered voice-over gossip suggests that she emigrated for love, love, only to be abandoned to "England—it's so cold." They com ment me nt on the th e objects in her room, frame framedd pho p hoto togr graph aphs, s, dried drie d flow flower ers, s, lace, shell necklaces. The son says, "I was ashamed of the things in
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this thi s hou se, this junk." The trendy, light-skinn light- skinned ed daughter says says dis para pa ragi ging ngly ly,, "It's "I t's b eco ec o m e q uite ui te fash fa shio iona nabl ble: e: n o u v eau ea u Negro." Negr o." Thei Th eirr dark-ski dark -skinned nned sister, who was obviously closer to her mother, defends fend s her: her : "She cher ch erish ish ed these the se things thi ngs,, she felt felt pro proud." ud." In flas flashb hbac acks ks w e see t heir he ir m o t h e r slow sl owly ly comb co mbin ingg and an d arra ar rang ngin ingg h er hair ha ir,, bath ba th-ing her he r feet with wi th oil and an d rose petals pet als,, and emotionall emotio nallyy looking over over the pho photogr tographs aphs.. But the whisp wh isp ered ere d voice-over gossip in Creole Creole and English Engl ish does no nott allow her peace. pea ce. In a bright, brig ht, flower flowered ed dress dres s recalling the warm wa rm countr cou ntryy of her birth, bir th, the wom an desperately despe rately lugs down dow n a suitcase. Then, haunted by the whispering voices, she writhes in a danc da ncee of agon agony, y, crying, "Englaaand!" "En glaaand!" Yet finall finallyy she rests, res ts, bowing to the ground, grou nd, palms pal ms facing facing up as though tho ugh in renunc ren unciati iation. on. The film film sug sug gests that the intensified presence of ritualized objects could salve the woman's double heartbreak of exile and abandonment, but also they could become unbearable reminders in this cold country. At other times a recollection-object is severed from the narrative in order to emphasize its witnessing quality. Such an object ap pea p earr s in Rea Tajiri's Tajiri 's History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991). Having succeeded in locating the barracks at Poston where her family was quartered during the internment—in fact, having be b e e n l ed t h e r e by insti ins tinct nct—Ta —Tajir jirii br brin ings gs b ack ac k a p iece ie ce of tar ta r p aper ap er from the roof of the building. The worn, grayish object is displayed against a black backgr ound, ound , like a jewel, even thoug h it is is not mu ch at all to look at. A title reads "Tarpaper, Poston barrack." The tar pa p a p e r ' s v alu al u e is t h at it was wa s o n the th e s cen ce n e of th t h e even ev ents ts of th t h e inte in terr n ment that Tajiri's mother cannot remember. 2 One could say the piece of tar paper, having been exposed to those events, "photographed" them and just needs to be developed: rectangular and gray, it even looks a bit like an old photograph. Tajiri's task, with this as with other mute objects in the tape, is to develop images from them. A film film may fail fail to connect conn ect a recollectio recol lection-ob n-object ject to memory, memory , so that tha t the object remains illegible, a fossil trace of forgotten or inexpli cable histories. These failures are just as informative as successful connecti conn ections ons are, fo forr by maintain main taining ing the th e "incompossibility" "incompossib ility" of diff differ er ent cultural disco urses they demonstrat e the une nding ndi ng struggle over over meaning that characterizes intercultural life. Such a film is Gary Kibbins's Finagnon (1 (199 995) 5),, whic wh ichh begins begi ns its histori hist orical cal search sea rch with wi th an odd artifact of postcolonial relations, a French-language reader forr schoolch fo scho olchild ildren ren in the Republic of of Benin. Kibbins approaches approache s the t he
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textbook from a number of angles to try to elicit its history, but the book bo ok rem r emai ainn s m u t e. It hin hi n t s at th t h e colo co loni nial al rel r elat atio ions ns t h a t e n g e n d e r ed it, but it is unable to call up the experience of the African school children who read it. Recollection-objects need not have a primarily visual relation to the originary event they represent. Consider Proust's tisane with dunked madeleine: a smell fetish, whose perfume unlocked vol umes of memories. As in the previous chapter, in examining the histories containe cont ained d in these images, I find find that tha t the meanings meanin gs that tha t are
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lost and found in the course of (space or time) travel are often ex pressed in terms of nonaudiovisual sense knowledges. In chapters g 3 and 4 1 will develop the significance of these sense knowledges in £ cinema and their implications in an intercultur al context.
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Fossils acquire their meaning by virtue of an originary contact. A fossil is the indexical trace of an object that once existed, its animal or vegetable tissue now become stone. Consider how similar this is to the photographic process. Fossils are created when an object makes contact with the witnessing material of earth. Photographs are created when light reflected by an object makes contact with the witnessing material of film. In both cases, this contact transforms the material's surface so that it becomes a witness to the life of the object, even after the latter has decayed. Created in one layer of his tory, the fossil witness is gradually covered with more sedimental layers. But instead of disintegrating it solidifies and becomes trans formed. So when some earthquake happens years later or continents away, these objects surface, bearing witness to forgotten histories. As C. Nadia Seremetakis writes, objects invested with sensory mem ory "are expressions of non-synchronicity which become material encounters with cultural absence and possibility" (1994,12). These objects are that special kind of recollection images, fossil images, discussed in the previous chapter. To summarize briefly, the meta phor of the "radioactive fossil" describes the unsettling quality of certain inexplicable but powerful cinematic images. This is how Deleuze describes a cinematic image that seems to embody a past that is incommensurable with the present the image depicts. By virtue of its indexical character, cinema allows unresolved pasts to surface in the present of the image. To Deleuze, fossils are not cold stone objects but rather live, dangerous things. Images are fos sil beds, where the fossils are those strange and stubborn images that seem to arise from a reality that is at odds with its surround ings—"memory fragments that surface repeatedly to consciousness but are mysterious in their mean ing" (Sternburg 1994, 178). These images refer to the power of recollection-images to embody differ ent pasts. When an image is all that remains of a memory, when it cannot be "assigned a present" by an act of remember ing bu t simply
stares up at one where it has been unear thed, th en that image is a fossil of what has been forgotten. It is possible, though as Deleuze warned, dangerous, to examine these images and learn the histories they have witnessed. Deleuze uses the term fossil only casually in the cinema books, but I have seized upon it because it indicates the material quality of the recollection-image. For Benjamin, fossil is mu ch more com plex. His unfinished Passagen-Werk reads the entire history of postindustrial Europe in the fragmentary and forgotten objects of the nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Paris, which he compares to "caves containing fossils of an animal presumed extinct," namely consumers in the early era of capitalism (quoted in Buck-Morss 1989, 64). Small, forgotten, or seemingly frivolous objects capture Benjamin's fascination throughout his writings, as when he wan ders Moscow, ignoring its heroic Communist monuments in favor of toy stores and sweet shops (Benjamin 1986). Yet beyond idiosyn crasy, the power of Benjamin's attention to objects is that he sees in the m a power to witness history that narratives lack.3 In the debris of industrial culture he reads the culture's own fragility (Buck-Morss 1989,170). Thus fossils in Benjamin's usage bear forth the history of capitalism as a natural history.
Fetishes
I would like to build a recuperative notion of fetishism for a dis cussion of intercultural cinema. Certainly an oppressive kind of fetishism is at work in postcolonial relations. Fetishism aptly de scribes the violent colonialist impulse to freeze living cultures and suspend them outside of time. Critics such as Edward Said (1979), Johannes Fabian (1983), Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989, 1993), and Homi Bhabha (1994b) have skewered this fetishistic quality of colonialism decisively. Without forgetting these critiques, I want to claim other meanings of fetishism in order to describe the transformations that occur in postcolonial and transnational movement. In fetishism, power does not inhere in beings but flows among them. Fetish objects can encode knowledges that become buried in the process of temporal or geographic displacement but are volatile when reactivated by memory. Fetishes get their power not by repre senting that whic h is powerful but through contact wit h it, a contact
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whose materiality has been repressed. As such, fetishes, like fossils, have an indexical relation to an original scene like that of a photog graph. Photographs, of course, are fetishistic in that they hypostatize £ an instantaneous visual aspect of a scene before the camera, forget,-g ting all its other aspects. "o Benjamin's genealogy of the term fetish is shared with other neo2 Marxist uses of the term. It functions similarly to his usage oi fossil, o but it brings in other connotations. In the essay "On Some Motifs in H Baudelaire" he continues the argument, developed throughout the Passagen-Werk, that collective life can be manifest in objects. In addition, following Freud, he stresses the most powerful memory fragments are those that encode an incident that remains inac cessible to conscious memory (1968a, 160), that is, fetishes. Here Benjamin demonstrates the meeting between Marxist and psycho analytic understandings of the fetish: the fetish object encodes truths of collective life, and these truths can be discovered only through a shock that reaches the unconsc ious. Although this meeting is impor tant, psychoanalytic understandings of the fetish remain less useful for my purposes than neo-Marxist and anthropological approaches. The fetish is a product specific to intercultural encounters, as William Pietz (1987) argues in his impressive archaeology of the term. The etymology of the word fetish describes a long and com plex history of colonization, appropriation, and translation. Briefly, Pietz traces the transformation of the Portuguese word feitigo from its use in Christian witchcraft law to the word Fetisso (also Portu guese, from the pidginization of feitigo) used by explorers in the part of West Africa that they called Guinea. Rather than transliter ate an African term, Portuguese traders applied a Portuguese word to African cultural practices. In the later construction, "fetishism" was the sort of practice that invested lifelike powers in objects them selves, powers attained through physical contact. It came to be dis tinguished from idolatry because the objects concerned did not rep resent deities but in their very materiality held godlike powers. For example, the feather of a sacrificial chicken is a sacred fetish be cause the chicken is sacred; the relics of saints, preserved fingers or scraps of cloth, gain their value as a fetish through contact with the saint. The fetishistic relationship is between two sacred objects, not a deity and an object. Thus fetishes, to European intellectuals' way of thinking, were stubbornly nontranscendental.
The notion of the fetish was mobilized during a per iod of imperial expansion. Pietz argues that this notion played a significant role in establishing European preconceptions about hu ma n consciousness and the material world, preconceptio ns on whic h the disciplinary human sciences that arose in the nin eteenth centur y were founded, For example, as he describes, the travelogues of Dutch mer cha nts such as Willem Bosman portrayed African fetish worship as the perversion of the sort of rational self-interest that they saw as "the natural organizing principle of good social order" (Pietz 1988,107). These writers' particular narratives were seized upon for general illus trative purposes by Enlightenment intellectuals, and also by Marx (Pietz 1993). Marx's choice to compare the abstracting process of capitalism with what was seen as the irrational practice of fetishism was a brilliantly perverse way to align materialism with rationality. However, this tactic elided the intercultural roots of the "primitive" practice Marx appropriated to bolster his critique of capitalism. The term fetishism was first use d by a particular stratum of Eur o peans to describe peasant superstitions, as well as Catholic ritual (Pietz 1987). Only later did it come to describe the practices of Afri cans. Fetishism, then, originated as a ter m used to separate the ruling Protestant, protocapitalist groups from others both outside and within the culture. The early use of "fetishism" to describe the prac tices of both European peasants and West Africans reaffirmed the emerging European powers' belief that, unlike themselves, these groups were irrational, incapable of abstraction, and mired in the body. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) argue in a similar vein that the rise of the European bourgeoisie neces sitated a process of distantiation both inter- and intraculturally. In order to consoli date an identity that was capable of "rising above" the merely bodily, the bourgeoisie projected its own unacceptable excesses elsewhere, separating itself from the carnivalesque practices of the peasants. Colonial expansion exacerbated this process, as an even more pri mi tive other became available for the disgusted/desiring projections of the European middle classes. Thus in some ways the forbidden object of desire is already an intercultural one, for the desire that the bourgeoisie had forbidden itself became embodied in primitivist fantasies. It is important to note that intercultural fetishism is initiated both by the fetishizers and t he fetishized: in this case, between the Portu-
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guese traders and African middlemen who "explained" African spiritual practices to them. Pietz suggests that West African informants themselves use d the term Fetisso to describe their practices to the Portuguese, thus pre-emptively translating an aspect of their cultural practice to the Europeans. This pre-emptive fetishism had the effect of shielding actual ceremonial practices from scrutiny 4 It is in this sense that the discourse of the fetish "has always been a critical discourse about the false objective values of a culture from which the speaker is personally distanced" (1985, 14), always an intercultural discourse. Such an understanding of the process of fetishism avoids thinking of the fetishized person, object, or culture as simply the victim of cultural appropriation. Instead it acknowl edges that fetishism is a mutual act that reveals information about both par ticipants in the exchange. The archaeological process of discovering the meaning of such historical fetish objects recognizes that they cannot be deciphered with finality, but must be treated as keys to a particular historical moment. Fetishes are material microcosms; as Adorno wrote, they are "objective constellations in which the social represents itself" (quoted in Mitchell 1986, 204). Pietz similarly describes t he fetish in neo-Marxist terms as the nexus of a specific intercultural encounter. "The fetish must be viewed as proper to no historical field other than that of the history of the word itself, and to no discrete society or culture, but to a cross-cultural situation formed by the ongoing encounter of the value codes of radically different social orders. In Marxist terms, one might say that the fetish is situated in the space of cultural revolution" (1987,10).
Fetishes and Fossils of Transnational Life
Fossils, fetishes, and recollection-objects should again remind us of the dialectical images Benjamin found in the nineteenth-century shopping arcades, the cracks in material reality in which one can read repressed histories. Susan Buck-Morss suggests that "fetish" and "fossil" both describe the commodity (1989, 211), in its concretization of history and concentration of affect. Such objects are rubble in the ruin of recent history. They are not only the wish images of past histories, but also the material of which "a ne w order can be constructed" (212). Bricoleurs—people who take the rubble
of another time or place, invest it with ne w significance, and pu t it to new purposes—create the possibilities of new history. The dis placed person is th e preeminent bricoleur, asserts The Last Angel of History (1995), John Akomfrah's film about Black science fiction. The film surveys African diaspora futurist artists from the late (and mourned) jazzman Sun Ra to the novelist Octavia Butler, interspersing them with a Black flaneur figure who wanders in a sort of industrial wasteland. He says in passing, "African people have always done science fiction, because we've always be en able to see the holes in the present." The bricoleur is able to find creative potential in the ruins of another culture because these objects, surrounded by a forcefield of imperfect translation, acquire a transformational quality in their travels. Fetishes and fossils, then, are two kinds of objects that condense cryptic histories within themselves and that gather their peculiar power by virtue of a prior contact with some originary object. Fe tishes and fossils are nodes, or knots, in which historical, cultural, and spiritual forces gather wit h a particular intensity. They translate experience through space and time in a material medi um, encoding the histories produc ed in intercultural traffic. This view of the fetish as an object produced in the encounter between cultures strongly underscores Homi Bhabha's characterization of colonial stereotypes as fetishes: sites where cultural difference is fixed, but in their very fixity belie the instability of the encounter (1994b, 70-75). The inter cultural space in which fetishes and fossils are produced is always charged with power; it is not a neutral ground where meanings can be remade with impunity. If we understand fetishes as properly the product not of a single culture, but of the encounter between two, th en we see how fetishes are produced not only in the course of built-up time, but also in the disjunctive movement through space. Colonial power relations in particular, with their propensity for crossbreeding indige nous and imported meanings, are prime sites for the production of these objects. Where two or more material discourses crash to gether are formed any number of peculiar artifacts: consider the Korean peasant ceramics that were taken up as aesthetic objects by their six teenth-century Japanese colonizers (and the aestheticized copies that ensued). The famous tulip boom and bust in seventeenth-century Holland was the result of a national obsession
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with a flower of Persian origin, which Dutch importers crossbred again and again to achieve rarefied, arcane variations—tulips of strange colors, tulips exposed to viruses to produce tattered, varie gated petals. National dishes such as mulligatawny stew (Britain) or rijstaffel (Holland) translate the cuisine of the colonies for local palates. These are some examples of fetishlike objects that are the product of two- (or more) directional, power-inflected appropria tion and retranslation. Postcolonial life is producing fetishes at record speed as people become displaced, especially as they emigrate to their former colo nizers' lands. Cultural transformation in diaspora is usually neither a full-blown assimilation nor an utterly random "hybrid," though of course both those patterns occur. More often, cultural practices pass through a selection process that, like the baggage scales at interna tional airports, determines what is jettisoned and what is kept in the passage. What travels best is usually high class and patriarchyfriendly. It is the peasant practices, the women's practices, and often the sensory practices, that go first; the bags of spice that spill from the overpacked luggage onto the waiting room floor. Diaspora intel lectuals have usually already met the requirements for fitting into Western academic and cultural establishments, such as a cash base, a Western education, fluency in Romance languages, and member ship in their indigenous elite. 5 The interstitial space of the fetish pro duces meaning, lots of mean ings, but they are built on incompreh ension . For example, the bindi that Shauna Beharry's mother, like all Hindi married women, wore on her forehead signifies exotic Oriental desirability in popular erotica in the West. As she describes it in Seeing Is Believing (1991), Beharry's own skin takes on meanings over which she has no con trol. White people ask this brown-skinned Canadian woman where she comes from. If the response "Moosejaw" doesn't satisfy them, then, in order to answer, Beharry must undertake an excavation of the Indian heritage that sets her apart. Her body is inscribed with a language she must laboriously learn to read. That is, she must learn to read for the purpose of translating back to people who assume the right to know things in their own language. When she finds, for example, that she is not "typical Indian," that her skin and eyes are different because her grandfather was Chinese—well, not exactly Chinese, he was from Hong Kong—and no, she doesn't speak Urdu
or Hindi, she grew up in Ireland—the weight of explanation be- 91 comes overwhelming. This bu rd en of explanation is why people who are moving be- H tween cultures find that their luggage gets heavier and heavier. Their ° familiar objects are fossilizing. What was taken for granted in one o culture becomes incomprehensible in another, and it becomes the o immigrant's responsibility to build up and to excavate those layers 0 of impossible translation. H Postcolonial history is necessarily an investigation of fossils. We B* are constantly discovering inexplicable factoids on the surface of represented history that invite us to cut through the layers and con nect them to their source, cutting between private recollection and official discourse. More often than not, the investigator contracts their infectious quality, finding that her own history is based on par tial truths. The "piece of the rock" that contains our own lives, con stituting them both in terms of and separate from dominant history, disintegrates into unstable, seething sands, and we have no choice but to sift through, looking for clues. Deleuze's hallucinatory list of the qualities of the fossil, espe cially its destructive potential, resonates strongly with Pietz's (and Benjamin's; see Buck-Morss 1989) intimations that fetishes are revo lutions just waiting to happen. Both fossil and fetish, in the senses I have described, carry within them histories that, once unraveled, make the present untenable. The "radioactive" aspect of these ob jects is that they may arouse other memories, causing inert pres ences on the most recent layer of history themselves to set off chains of associations that had been forgotten. Yet I would like to recon sider the contaminating and carcinogenic connotations of the image of radioactivity. Certainly these image fossils from other times or other places are volatile, and will behave uncontrollably when they are exposed to viewers, just as radioactive materials decompose and emit energy when they are exposed. But the danger is in realizing that there exist histories that are contradictory to those one knows, cultural knowledges that shake the security of one's own cultural position in the world. This is an unsettling, de-composing experi ence, and it is certainly destructive of firmly ethnocentric views, for example. But I like to think of it as a benign form of "contamina tion," such as what happens wh en a perfume blows one's way (or, to stay with the fossil metaphor, when a long-preserved funerary un-
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guent startles archaeologists with the immediacy of its fragrance). One cannot avoid smelling it, it pervades one's immediate environment and inevitably reroutes one's thoughts, it is at the same time both exigent and ambient. The cinematic fossils I examine here do indeed have an unsettling effect, bu t they are only as destructive as the material they assault is rigid.
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Indexical Witness: Cinema as Fetish and Fossil
As I stated earlier, transnational objects are not only discursive pro ductions; their meaning cannot be separated from their materiality. 6 Fetishes resist abstraction. They insist on the materiality of the origi nal presence to which they refer. Hence the dismissal of Catholic "fetishism" by Protestants and commodity fetishism by Marx. Their value is not transferable. They cannot be traded for money. They do not symbolically represent power; they physically embody it. To think of the moving image as a fetish or fossil implies understand ing it not as a representation, which is volatile only because of the projections brought to it, b ut as an emissary, which is volatile to the degree that the viewer/receiver has access to the materiality of its original scene. The implication of the notion of contact that underlies both the fossil and the fetish is that representation and knowledge are not to be explained exclusively on the level of language, but also partici pate in contact with the object repres ented. The objects I discuss here encode material conditions of displacement as well as discur sive ruptures. Representation and knowledge participate in contact with the object repr esented. Their substrate is not solely a "referent" but also a material touchstone. Clearly, then, in my use the tropes of fossil and fetish operate on a fairly concrete level. Both can be used simply as heuristic devices based on a notion of contact with some original, powerful object. I wan t to use them as more th an that, how ever. The notion of the fetish, in particular, I find epistemologically powerful because it is constituted from a physical, rather than men tal, contact between objects; it is not a metaphor. And re Bazin (1967) famously described photography as an imprint of the world, a trace of material presence like a death mask. This is the fetishlike/fossil-like quality that is at work in cinema: it is the
trace another material object leaves on the surface of the film (or en- 93 codes in video's electronic witness). This fact is what gives film its representational power, just as a fetish (in the religious sense) ob- H tains its power by carrying the trace of another material object. The ® use made of indexicality varies, to be sure, from evidentiary proof CD to mere ghostlike trace of the profilmic real. As Maren Stange (1994) g notes, the essential qualities of photographic indexicality must be 0 understood in the context of their historical use , the value placed H up on indexicality at different periods. Currently there is a lot of 5* suspicion regarding indexical evidence, at least among Western aca demics. 7 Yet I would like to suggest that the indexical capacities of an image or object are very important for those who have few sources of evidence, few witnesses to their stories. Thus the broad definition of documentary, as a cinema whose indexical relation to the real is of central importance (Nichols 1991, chapter 5), is still crucial to intercultural cinema. Any kind of cinema has this relation to the profilmic event, but only documentary claims this relation to the real as one of its defining qualities. By understanding the in dexicality of cinema as a fetishlike or fossil-like quality, I mean to emphasize that this trace of the real in cinem a is embalmed in layers of historical use and interpretation, which obscure and ultimately transform any original meaning the object might have had. Of course, these issues are not exclusive to intercultural cinema. All cinema has a fetishistic relationship to its object. All cinema is transnational in that its audiences will not be able to decode its images perfectly, insofar as they originate from other places and times. Intercultural cinema, however, takes these issues as its ex plicit subject, and the stakes of whether, how, and by whom its fetish-images and fossil-images can be translated are especially high. Film's ability to animate objects, indeed to anthropomorphize them, captivated early theorists of cinema. Bela Balasz devoted a chapter of his Theory of the Film ([1923] 1972) to the close-up. He considered that close-ups imparted a physiognomic quality to still objects. His tender, almost maudlin tone underscores the close-up's fetishlike ability to bear witness to the invisible: The first new world discovered by the film camera in the days of the silent film was the world of very small things visible only from short distances,
the hidden life of little things. . . . By means of the close-up the camera in the days of the silent film revealed also the hidden mainsprings of a life we thought we knew very well.... . . . The close-up shows your shadow on the wall with which you have lived all your life and which you scarcely knew; it shows the speechless face and fate of the dumb objects that live with you in your room and whose fate is bound up with your own. ([1923] 1948, 55) Further on Balasz notes, "Close-ups are often dramatic revelations of what is really happening under the surface of appearances" (56). Balasz attributed to the image the power to materialize invisible phenomena, to put a face on them. A close-up shot of an inanimate object or space, he suggests, is capable of capturing the subtle realm of nonorganic life. This need not sound mystical if one considers objects to embody the social in their very status as objects, and not merely as discourse hardened into things (see Pels 1995; Seremetakis 1994). Such anthropomorphic theories fell into disfavor with the rise of semiotic analyses of cinema: they certainly seem to appeal to the qualities of the image that "exceed" the power of the sign (see, for example, Barthes [1957] 1972, for a critique of this fetishistic quality of the cinema). But for the same reason, Balasz's theory is useful to a renewed discussion, not of how film fetishizes its objects, but how film can be a fetishistic medium. The physiognomic quality Balasz attributes to images is echoed in Deleuze's discussion of faciality (visageite) in cinema. Faciality is the intensification of affect in an image whose motor extension is limited: "It is this combination of a reflecting, immobile unity and of intensive expressive movements which constitutes the affect. . . . Each time we discover these two poles in something . . . we can say that this thing has been treated as a face [visage]: it has been 'envisaged' or rather 'faceified' [visagei fiee], and in turn it stares at us" (Deleuze 1986, 87-88). The facelike image is dense with affect that has been deposited in it from else where and that resists analysis. As Patricia Pisters (1998, 93) notes, because the affection-image, of which the facial image is a subset, reduces the spatial coordinates of the third dimension, it opens up to the fourth dimension of time and the fifth dimension of spirit. A facial image, Deleuze suggests, returns the look: this is, of course, a characteristic of auratic objects, as I will discuss.
From Gift to Commodity (and Back): Objects in Transit
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To under sta nd how history is encoded in objects, it is useful to re- H fine Marxist theorists' discussion of fetishism and representation Q with anthropological theories of exchange. The generations follow- CD ing Marcel Mauss's ([1950] 1990) germinal study of gift economies o have tended to focus on the process of exchange itself. However, 0 lately anthropologists have also been returning to the question of H the objects of exchange themselves. Arjun App adurai (1986), Igor 5* Kopytoff (1986), Annette Weiner (1992), Nicholas Thomas (1991), w and C. Nadia Seremetakis (1994) all describe the movement of ob jects within and between cultures as not only a market exchange but also a cultural one; this circulation produces, in Kopytoff's words, a "cultural biography of things." Their approach permits a certain ob duracy of the object to remain, so that we can pay attention to the object in its irreducible materiality in spite of efforts, by investors and by theorists, to reduce transnational flows to simply the flows of capital or of signs. Anthropologists and others have worked to trouble the distinction between the commodity and the gift (between Marx and Mauss), and between the social systems to which they are supposed to be proper. Common sense suggests that that only unique objects, not mass-produced commodities, can encode memory. But these dis tinctions are actually quite fluid, for within commodities lurks the (unwanted?) gift of particular histories. Maussian theory posits a number of differences between gift and commodity. Gifts are inalienable, that is, have no value separate from their owner, while commodities are alienable and circulate with no danger or loss of value; gifts have rank, or quality, while commodities have price, or quantity; gifts are subjects in their ability to enter into relations with people, while commodities are objects (Thomas 1991, 14). It has often been assumed that traditional soci eties are gift based and modern, capitalist societies are commodity based; where traditional societies use commodities, this is assumed to result from colonial influence. In fact this alignment is not so neat. Alienation, commodification, and abstract exchange do occur in noncapitalist societies, as Nicholas Thomas (1991) points out. Thomas's detailed historical study of exchange in Melanesia shows that indigenous societies vary greatly in the arrangements of their
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economies, some having vast categories of objects that do not enter exchange, while others are more widely commodifled. In addition, this difference is not a function of the infiltration of colonialism per se, but results from the degree to which a society has relations with other societies (Thomas 1991, chap ter 3). There is no doubt that our world system is interconnected by the flows of capital and power. Similarly, there is no doubt that the post colonial condition describes not only "third-world" situations but a space we all inhabit, interconnected as we are by global flows. Nevertheless, this process of worldwide interconnection is more complex than an inevitable process of capitalist reification, of end less commodification. It is incorrect to understand gift-type econo mies to operate only in "third-world" cultures while "first-world" economies are commodity based through and through. Even objects that move in the apparently sanitized flows of transnational capital encode movements of cultural translation and mistranslation. Arjun Appadurai looks at these translation processes in the social life of an object in terms of knowledge: the continuities and discontinu ities in knowledge between the producer and the consumer (1986, 42-44). There may be no knowledge gap in the local movement of a quart of peaches or the transnational movement of a car, both cases in which the produ cer an d consumer share knowledge about a com modity thanks to proximity or standardization. But large knowledge gaps mark the movement among cultures of objects that encode per sonal or ritual meaning. Appadurai complicates the Marxist notion of the commodity by understanding objects to move in and out of commodity status in the course of their lifetimes. In cross-cultural movement an object's "commodity status" is highly mobile; for example, a thing that is above commodification in one society may be a commodity candi date in another, and intercultural relations heighten the likelihood that an object may enter the commodity context of another society (1986, 14-17). Objects may pass in and out of identities as com modity, gift, ritual object, or trash (Kopytoff 1986, 67). In intercul tural movement this process accelerates. Through their travels and through being owned and used, objects become singular, gaining a biography. Objects contain a wealth of knowledge if only we could read them. Objects provide maps of their travels, the people who
produced and came into contact with them, and the shifts in their values as they move.
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The Cinema of Transn ational Objects
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Cinema, then, can follow an object in an attempt to elicit its cultural biography and to read the knowledge it embodies: to engage with the object discursively. In addition, as material objects themselves, film and video are uniquely capable of confronting the object in its material as well as its discursive meaning. Benjamin found dialec tical images in the ruins of the arcades; we might look for them on the Home Shopping Channel. We may also turn to the microgenre of films and videos that trace the movement of recollection-objects among cultures, works that perform a dialectical reading of objects. These examples begin with the relatively simple transnational con versions of labor to capital, and move to more idiosyncratic and intimate travels of fetishes, fossils, and transnation al objects. First are those works that trace the movement of an object as it shakes the traces of local cultures to beco me a deracinated, transna tional commodity. The transnational object in Amos Gitai's Ananas (1983) is a can of pineapple. Its contents are produced in Hawaii, its label printed in China, its can assembled on the North Ameri can continent, and so forth. The traces of humans who smelted the steel, harvested the fruit, and ran the printing press wou ld be utterly lost in the can of pineapple, as in most commodities, were it not for Gitai's excavation, which de-alienates their labor. Similarly, in Marta Rodriguez and Jorge Silva's Love, Women and Flowers (1988) the transnational object is the flowers that travel from a chemicalladen hothouse in Colombia by KLM jet to European florists. Rodri guez and Suva's film takes a flower so highly cultivated that it seems to grow right in the florist shop refrigerator—the stiff, long-lasting carnation—and endows it with haunting histories of women's labor. The flowers' low cost in Amsterdam or New York reflects success ful union-busting in Bogota; their conventional length, we learn, is ensured by women workers who mechanically lop off extra buds; their unblemished uniformity results from the same clouds of toxic fungicides that cause the workers to sicken and die. In Deleuze's terms, the carnation is a recollection-image of women's work, pain,
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Courtesy of Women Make Movies.
and solidarity. In Appadurai's terms, the film fills in a knowledge gap about the conditions in which the Colombian women labor, a gap that makes it easier for northern consumers to buy the flowers. Another film about suffering extracted from flowers is Jorge Furtado's Island of Flowers (1989), a surrealist documentary about the extremely poor people who live around and eke their livelihood from a garbage dump ("Isla das Flores") outside Rio de Janeiro. In five minutes, the film demonstrates with wicked economy the in exorable logic of making equations between money, commodities, and lives. Like Love, Women and Flowers, Island of Flowers is a savage critique of the process of capitalist abstraction, recreating in reverse the accordion-like movement whereby human suffering is transmuted into value. These films under tak e the Marxist project of reconstituting hu ma n labor to powerful effect. Nevertheless, it is hard to see the traces of human presence in these objects as any sort of communication. Though the women who grow the carnations may know well who is on the receiving end of their labor, such mass-produced commodi ties are sufficiently deracinated that the northern carnation buyers probably have no idea where their flowers came from. More complex intercultural movements endow objects with greater powers of memory and transformation. As global movements of capital and culture make the distinction between "first" and "third" worlds increasingly muddy, the shifts between commodity
and singularity accelerate and mutat e. Ordinary enough commodi- 99 ties become singular markers of status in Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart (1992), where the magazine Paris Match—a commodity H for a day, then trash, in France—becomes a rare and unique ob- ® ject in a neighborhood in Cameroon, making the shopkeeper of the CD quartier a local authority on Denzel Washington and Princess Di. o In Kidlat Tahimik's The Perfumed Nightmare (1978), objects regu- ^ larly move in and out of commodity status with the aid of fantasy, H or, more properly, fabulation. Kidlat (the character) has the knack 5" of finding unique objects, gifts, and fetishes among the anonymous commodities of Paris. The eggs he buys from an outdoor vendor tu rn out, every time he cracks one open, to have two giant yolks. Awed, Kidlat returns to the vendor, Lola, who explains that all her eggs are double-yolked because they came from the same grandfather—"not like those cheap supermarket eggs." The Filipino Kidlat, the French Lola, and the German artisans of church onion domes, whom he also visits, all marginal to the tide of international commerce, rec ognize objects for the hu ma n (and chicken) experience they encode. Kidlat also marvels at the vast high-tech chimneys on the city's n ew incinerator, big enough for three families to live in. At the end of the film, the president ex officio of the Werner von Braun Fan Club hijacks one of these vast white chimney-spaceships and flies home in it. This time, Kidlat uses his "bamboo technology" to magically reclaim the mass-produced object. A true fetishist, Kidlat turns one object to another use, as collectors turn another culture's utilitar ian objects into objets d'art. The final leg of his triumphant journey of fabulation is a Filipino commemorative stamp of Kidlat in the chimney-spaceship, "proving" that it happened. That humblest of commodities, the potato, is re-endowed with history and sacred powers in Alex Rivera's tape Papapapd (1996), whose title translates to "potato-father." Beginning with the tuber's sacred centrality to Inca culture, Rivera follows its historical journey from Latin America to Europe (in a stop-motion animated potato "race," which the brown potato unfortunately loses), up through the continent, and back to North America. As it travels, the potato acquires new cultural values and loses old ones. While the potato was as sacred to its Irish cultivators as to the Incas, its status falls dramatically on its return to the Americas. The potato's final reduc tion to commodity status is signaled by an interview with a spokes-
34- Still from Papapapd. Courtesy of Alex Rivera.
person for Tri-Sum Snacks, who explains that the company sees a vast potential market in Latin America for potato chips, as well as popcorn and pork rinds. At Tri-Sum, it is important that chips be light and uniform in color and untouched by human hands: this policy, the filmmaker suggests, reflects the unconscious racism of factory standardization. Meanwhile, the stakes of Rivera's historical quest are raised by his anxiety for his Peruvian father, now an ex patriate couch potato watching Latin American television in Miami. Rivera's long-baked potato bursts its commodity frame, revealing layers of memories and forgettings, capitalist expansion and cul tural recoding. Jean Rouch has exploited the transformations that people and objects experience as they cross between cultures in many films, including Jaguar (1971), Petit a petit (1969), and more recently Madame Veau (1993). His most famous experiment in the material embodiment of colonialism is surely Les Maitresfous (1953),a docu mentary of the Hauka movement in Niger, a cult whose members become possessed by the spirits of colonial administrators. This im portant film has been thoroughly discussed (for example, Taussig *993> 240-43; Stoller 1995]. I would note simply that one of the striking things about the film is that it documents a fetishistic spiri tuality, insofar as it is not the spiritual state of the worshippers' souls but the physical state of their bodies that mediate their rela tion to divine power: the Haukas' spirituality is immanent and em bodied. But of course what is most disturbing about the film is that
what the Hauka embody is the history of colonialism of the Song- 101 hay people; this spirituality seems to be nothing elevating but a harsh exorcism of a colonialism that infects the spirit and the body. ,_j Rouen's critique of colonialism is far more playful in Madame l'eau. ® In this film what moves is windmills, from Holland to Niger, su p- £D posedly at the inspiration of Rouen's friends Damoure, Lam, and g Tallou, to relieve the drought in their region. (These three collabo0 rators first appeared in Jaguar more th an twen ty years previously.) H Rather than being a miniature model of World Bank-style develop- 3* ment, in Madame l'eau the importation of windmills is marked by w magic and the mutual contamination of cultures. After the Dutch government has agreed to donate three windmills, the three Nigeri ans perform a divination sacrifice on the Dutch seacoast. Perhaps it is this ritual that invests the windmill with non-Dutch (and nondiscursive) powers, so that it causes a field of tulips to spring up overnight on the banks of the Niger.8 Another sort of work that traces the movement of objects among nations, gathering and erasing meanings as they go, is the film or tape that reconstitutes the path of an object as it becomes commoditized. Dennis O'Rourke's Cannibal Tours (1988) and Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor's In and Out of Africa (1992), for example, trace the process of cultural translation that makes local African objects into artifacts for export. Works like these follow not simply the pro cess of commodification of indigenous use-values into exchangevalues, but th e willful creation of fetishes in inter cultural transla tion. In and Out of Africa, which follows the traffic of the Muslim merchant Gabai Baare between West Africa and New York City, shows how Westerners desperately desire to import not just com modities but histories, and how go-betweens pander to that desire. Baare hires African workers to carve massive numbers of traditional ritual objects and then age them with root-based dyes and mud. The fake antiques prove to be recollection-objects that put the lie to the collectors' lofty notions of the universal beauty of (certain kinds of) African sculpture. When the American collectors buy these objects, they think they are buying aura, human experience encoded in an object. Yet in fact they are buying a quite different kind of experi ence, since these recollection-objects connect not to some authen tic African ritual practice but to a quite cynical process of market analysis. In and Out of Africa retraces a trade rou te that was built
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precisely to materialize colonial desires for a primitive authenticity, as they move from European and North American galleries and collections to African construction sites. Yet in following this route, the film not only deconstr ucts the collectors' desire but also reveals that the African sculptural objects are precisely intercultural products, as in Pietz's definition of the fetish. Commissioned by the trader Baare, they are the result of their African pro ducers' reasoned second-guessing of Western collectors' fantasies about Africa. The European and American collectors interviewed in the tape disdain the African sculptures that implicate them in the real his tory of European-African relationships. Colon figures, sculptures of white colonists, are rejected by one collector as lacking the univer sality and spirituality of traditional African sculpture. The European collectors prefer works that refer to a timeless, precolonial "Africa," works that deny the coevalness of European and African cultures (Fabian 1983).9 Ironically, it is these figures that actually are spiritual for their African makers; they are used in ritual practices to embody the power of the colonizers just as the Hauka dealt with their colo nial history by embodying the spirits of the Europeans. The colon figures, like Cuna Indian figurines in the shape of General Douglas MacArthur and other foreigners (Taussig 1993, 10), materially em body spirituality: they are the radioactive fossils of colonialism. Misguided—or dangerously knowledgeable—collectors also fig ure in Victor Masayesva's Imagining Indians (1994). The collectors Masayesva interviews are variously knowledgeable about the native objects they own, from the greedy amateurs at a weekend fair to the dealer who is well enough informed about the kachina mask he owns to be uncomfortable with its power. The latter is waiting to restore the stolen mask to the Hopi community, if it can be ac knowledged that he bought it legitimately. "I talk to it and feed it cornmeal," he says, showing that he is attempting to respect Hopi custom. Yet Masayesva suggests that a little knowledge is a danger ous thing. It is safe enough for hobbyists to buy native artworks that, like Baare's fake antiques, are produced for the market. The trans action may be marked by colonial desire, but the manufacturers are practicing a pre-emptive fetishism, effectively protecting their culture by sending out decoy objects. The knowledgeable collector, however, is attempting to break through the layers of intercultural translation and to penetrate to the center of Hopi ritual practices.
36 and 37. Stills from Imagining Indians
104 g j£ £ *o 2 © H
Like Masayesva, I think that another culture's spiritual identity is non e of our busin ess, and that to attempt an unmed iated encounter with the most sacred objects of another culture is even more destructive than to fetishize them. As the dealer continues to speak, earnestly and rather arrogantly, Masayesva digitally erases him from the frame so that only the Navajo blanket behind him remains. AH these examples emp hasize the singularity and materiality of an object, even, or especially, those objects that are supposed to be reducible to signs thr oug h exchange. The carnation, the potato, the Paris Match, the windmill: it is these objects' uniqu e trajecto ries through time and space that invest them with a value properly called auratic. Market-based equations do not manage to capture their value. Nor, I would argue, do film theories based on Saussurean semiotics, in which any sign can equal any other. The irreducible materiality of these objects calls for a film theory that respects their aura as distillations of history. The films and videos discussed above may seem to be only films "about" transnational objects, works that take these objects as their subject matter and nothing more. But as my discussion moves to more idiosyncratic objects, I hope to show that it is the ability of film and video to make contact with these things' material presence that gives these works their unset tling power.
The Memory of Transnational Objects
Another such volatile commodity circulates in Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls (1994; a China-Hong Kong-Japan coproduction) by Xie Fei.10 In this fiction film, Xiang, a Chinese village woman who runs a sesame oil factory, gets acclaim when her product is adopted by a Japanese company. The sought-after product, and the fetish in this story, is the sesame oil. It is said to get its flavor from the high-quality local sesame seeds and the clear water of the lake by which the village was built. The lake is also said to have an un usual perfume, according to the legend that two women once com mitted suicide by drowning themselves in the lake, rather than enter loveless marriages. Yet Xiang herself is unhappily married, and she has also forced a marriage between her mentally retarded son and a young woman, Huanhuan, despite the latter's wishes. The film suggests that the heartache of the women who run the factory is
essential to the flavor of the oil: local experience and local memory 105 bottled for international consumption. This extremely local product is chosen for mass production and export by Japan, representative of _j multinational capital. The Japanese characters in the film are repre- ® sented as urban and rootless, in contrast to the people of the village © who live intimately with their history. What happ ens wh en what o is considered universally superior, the Platonic form of sesame oil, ^ turns out to be the bottled product of local memory? H The film is exhibited under two English titles: the literal transla OS tion Woman Sesame Oil Maker, and the more poetic Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls. This double title is another case of the mutation of transnational objects. The Chinese title refers prosai cally to the commercial product. The title for foreign consumption calls up connotations of ancient, ineffable Chinese culture. The fur ther the product (both the oil and the film) travels, in other words, the more its meanings become rarefied and distanced from their ma terial origin. On the other hand, distance also makes it possible to specify the emotional source of the sesame oil's flavor, which would have been anath ema back in the village. Its manufacturers attribute the flavor of the oil to the clear water of the lake. They are at pains not to disclose the story of the thwarted lovers who drowned them selves in the lake, for fear of repelling their customers. But by the time the product is at a safe distance from the village, the romantic story only enhances its value. Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls traces a remarkable pro cess of concentration and displacement in the production of trans national objects: an emotional, even spiritual phe nomen on becomes the force underlying the appeal of a commodity. It should not be surprising that what gets (literally) bottled in the film is women's experience, whose expression is not sanctioned by the culture. The painful relationship b etween Xiang and Huanhuan is built on an unresolvable contradiction: the former requires her daughter-in-law to submit to a loveless marriage, as she herself did, in order to main tain the coherence of the family business. In the tense scenes be tween these women, the strained, truncated dialogue tends to be confined to the household chores. Neither speaks of the bruises that the daughter-in-law's husband has inflicted on her. A tacit under standing grows between the two when the young woman discovers that her mother-in-law has had a lover for the entire duration of
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her marriage. In these scenes, the wo men never meet one another's glance. Often one spies on the other from a window onto the courtg yard of the house. Their final exchange takes place, in effect, through E a veil: standing on the roof amid lau ndr y hung to dry, the daughteris in-law is silhouetted behind a sheet while her mother-in-law, in a *o few subdued wor ds, releases her from her bondage. In Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls the tragedy of the women's lives finds £ © no verbal expression, and is mu ted visually as well. The longing H and pain of generations of wo me n appears only in the fragrance of the sesame oil they produce. (And the film is not a tirade against modernity: when the factory's primitive machinery is replaced by modernized equipment, an investment from the Japanese backers, the flavor of the oil is not altered. Instead, it is the specifically emo tional character of the labor that affects the oil's quality.) It is only a slight shift from the commodified objects in the works described above to noncommodified, personal objects. While those volatile commodities encode social more than individual histories, the meaning of personal objects resides in their power to release memories that are specific to individuals. These processes are not "merely" personal, however; rather, they suggest how the personal and idiosyncratic may be the only visible aspect of broader cul tural histories (Seremetakis 1994, 135). The significance of the sort of transnational movement contained in personal objects cannot be underestimated. How often has it been the case that memories that were seen as "only" private proved to be the sole repositories of diasporic cultures? It is important to take seriously what seem to be isolated, idiosyncratic, or seemingly private phenomena, because they may prove to be the only level at which widespread cultural movements are able to speak. Earlier I mentioned th e piece of tar pap er that is one of several ob jects that encode history in Tajiri's History and Memory. The object that Tajiri most successfully pursues to learn what it "remembers" is a wooden bird her grandmother carved in the detention camp at Poston. This colorful object, shot, like the piece of tar paper, against a black background, comes to resonate on another historical level when Tajiri finds a photo in the National Archives. Going through a box of documents from the internment camps, Tajiri comes across a photograph of a roomful of peop le working at long tables, labeled
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38. Still from History and Memory
"Bird-carving class, August 1941," and there in the photo is her grandmother. The archive—in this case, the literal archive—is as ignorant of Mrs. Tajiri's private history as she is willfully amnesiac of it. Only the bird remembers. Traveling from the prison camp to the family home, the wooden bird embodies a recollection that is now lost. The carved figure that now resides in Tajiri's mother's jewelry box is material evidence of a trauma her mother has almost wholly forgotten. Personal objects remember and attest to events that people have forgotten. Like cameraless films made by placing things directly on the negative, some works undertake to excavate the memories of objects merely by exposing them and "developing" the stories they retain. Such a work is Walid Ra'ad's short video, Missing Lebanese Wars (1996). Like several other expatriate Lebanese artists, among them Yasmine Khlat {Leylouna notre nuit, 1987), Olga Nakkas {Leba non: Bits and Pieces, 1994), an d Jalal Toufic [Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995), Ra'ad returns to his old home to ask the walls, the pictures, and the objects to recount the "missing" war and explain the marks it left on his family. The tape begins with a meditation on photography's ability both to fix and to undermine the truth of an event. "It is a well-known fact that the major histori ans of the Lebanese civil war were compulsive gamblers during the war period." Every Sunday, Ra'ad explains, Marxists, Islamists, and
39 and 40. Stills from Missing Lebanese Wars. Courtesy of Walid Ra'ad. Maronite nationalists went to the racetrack to bet not on the horses but on what moment of the photo finish wo uld be rep resen ted in the newspaper the next day. This scene is shot so as to deny the camera's ability to capture visible evidence. All we see of the race, in a series of blurry dissolves, are fragmented close-up shots of the crowd of spectators at the track. In the next scene, over a melan choly oboe solo from Marcel Khalife's "Ghina'iyat Ahmed Al Arabi," a voice-over recounts ho w a woman named Zainab Fakhouri left her husband during the war, taking seventeen objects with her on the journey from Bir Zeit to Beirut to Amman to Free Town. To illus trate this journey, Ra'ad isolates details from still photographs of family gatherings, homing in not on the faces of loved ones but on the objects behind them. Encoding years of memories, the objects bear witness to how the war came to make itself felt in the mar-
riage. Meanwhile, as the third part of this short tape explains, her ex-husband, historian Fadl Fakhouri, has his own memory objects: he spends his days listening to recordings of his old lectures about the Lebanese civil war and rearranging his son's bullet collection (we see the bullets lined up on the bedspread), as though the right combination wou ld make sense of his past. Ra'ad's oblique, seemingly dispassionate, and overtly fictionalized approach hin ts that to try to recover the memories these fossils contain would be too painful. Instead he moves cautiously over their surface, examining the geological forces that produced them . A later tape by Ra'ad, Secrets in the Open Sea (1997), makes even more ex plicit the power of objects to remember materially what is officially forgotten—in only three minutes. A number of photographic plates, Ra'ad explains in voice-over, were found in the intelligence head quarters of the warring militias active during the civil war. As he speaks we see the blue Mediterranean and more of those any-spacewhatever Beirut streetscapes such as Ra'ad and Jayce Salloum used in Talaeen a Junuub (1993). He continues: the Arab Research Insti tute in Beirut sent these plates to labs in France and the United States for analysis, where they were found to rep resent group portraits; we see this series of stills, some of which are obviously newsp rint half tones. All the people in the photographs, Ra'ad explains, were mem bers of the militias, and all h ad drowned at sea in the past few years. The film closes in silence with a percussive sequence of blu ish rect angles. In Deleuze's phrase, something is hi dden in the image: these flat rectangles are witnesses to a disappearance. The very elaborate ness of the research project Secrets in the Open Sea purports to record hints that the whole thing is a fake. A supporting document published by Ra'ad asserts that the prints' $i50,ooo-each develop ment costs were defrayed by contributions from corporations, indi viduals, and the fictional Fakhouris of Missing Lebanese Wars, and that the Arab Research Institute contains 4,600 additional "indexed microfiched" documents (Ra'ad 1997). Such comfortable resources would be a fantasy for any artist, but especially one whose search for objective records of the Lebanese civil war has turned up only contradiction and denial. More wishfulness shows in the fake open ing credit, "BBC and Canal+ present." In short, the story that the photographic plates hide in their blue surfaces is not true—that is, it may well be tru e, but they are not telling it. Yet the blue plates that
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briefly present their faces to the screen are radioactive, objects that look inert but contaminate the discourse of tru th surrounding them.
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Objects and Sense Memory
As an object decays it often changes in texture and emits odors. -£ As a recollection-object breaks down, throug h the engagement with © memory, memory generates sensations in the body (Bergson [1911] H 1998,179). Thus an image, insofar as it engages with memory at all, engages the memory of the senses. And as I will insist, the senses often remember when nobody else does. The memory of the senses may call forth histories of transnational objects, histories that have been lost en route. How can knowledge be embodied in senses other than the visual? How can one form of sense knowledge embody another? I ask the reader's patience while in the rest of this chap ter I raise the stakes of such questions, which will be the subject of chapters 3 and 4. Food and the plants on which it grows are recollection-objects in a number of intercultural films and videos. On Tajiri's visit to Poston she videotapes the date palms that the Japanese American prisoners planted almost fifty years earlier. Tall and strong, the trees attest to the presence of the people who "brought water to the desert and made things grow," and to the concentrated sweetness of the fruit they might have tasted. In Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992), okra and other vegetables imported from Africa act as memoryfossils for the inhabitants of Ibo Landing. Okra figures in Marlon Riggs's Black Is, Black Ain't (1995): it is an important ingredient in gumbo, which Riggs uses not only as a metaphor for the differ ences and commonalities among African diasporic people, but also a means of recreating African diasporic communities through memo ries of smell and taste and rituals of cooking. Great Girl (1994), a film by Kim Su Theiler, retraces a young American woman's journey back to her Korean bir thplace. Her search for her home and mother is inconclusive, except for a couple of indexical traces. One is a scar on the young woman's forehead. A woman who may have been her mother does not recognize her, but she tells of an accident her little daughter h ad with the scissors that wou ld explain the scar. The other is sweet potatoes. The narrator tells how she met Mr. Chao, the former gardener of the orphanage where she was supposedly raised,
41. Frame enlargement from Great Girl.
Courtesy of Women Make Movies.
when she went to the village. "He said he didn't recognize me, but he said that if I'd eaten sweet potatoes, he had planted them." The material memory of sweet potatoes connects Kim Su and the gar dener, even though neither of them remembers with certainty that she lived there. Sense memories are most fragile to transport, yet most evocative when they can be recovered. Hamid Naficy notes that it is espe cially important to consider the nonaudiovisual ways that exiles experience film and television: "The exiles produce their difference not just through what they see and hear but through their senses of smell, taste, and touch. Indeed, these aspects of the sensorium often provide, more than sight and hearing, poignant reminders of differ ence and of separation from homeland" (1993,152-53). What is left out of expression registers somatically, in pain, nausea, memories of smells and caresses. What does not register in the orders of the seeable and sayable may resonate in the order of the sensible.
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The originary fossil-image in History and Memory— the image that encodes lost memories—is that of a woman filling a canteen g at a pu mp . It is Tajiri, reenacting her mother's sole recollection§ image from the inter nment camps. A tiny puncture of pleasure in i j the eternal vigilance the woman must hold in order to survive in t o the concentration camp, it will be the only image to remain years 22 later, wh en that other narrative of deprivation has been pu t away.
42. Still from History and Memory
43. Still from Seeing Is Believing
ingly mournful content, read in voice-over, has a muffling quality that seems to want to fill in the gap by appealing to the memory of touch. All three of these videos call upon tactile memory to create a communication between daughters and mothers that words, and audiovisual images, could not. All three use sense memory to re store the history that has become fossilized in an object. Ultimately they defetishize the object, by teasing out the story it contains. Similarly, consider how smell is an indexical witness. Failing di rect neural stimulation (olfactory hallucination), we smell because molecules from the source of smell have reached the membranes
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within our noses. Smell req uir es contact, molecules coming into touch with receptors. A source of smell gradually diminishes over g time as its particles disperse. To smell something, then , is to particiE pate in its gradual destruction. But it is also to share the experience jg of the thing with others who smelled it before. Smell is the quin"o tessentially fetishistic and defetishizing sense: it depend s up on the £ presence of th e object, bu t it also destroys it. 0 Beharry is quite aware that the power of touch, smell, and taste H lies in their transitoriness. She makes this a theme of her perfor mance "Ashes to Flowers: The Breathing," whose title alone suggests a reverse movement of fetishism, where a live thing is reconstituted from dead traces. Participants smell incense and the food she pre pares; at the end of the performance they walk on raw rice strewn in patterns on th e floor, perceiving the image with the sense of touch at the same time that they destroy it. But to transfer this sense of the fleetingness of the senses to a recording medium, in both its intensity and its evanescence, requires that the fetishlike quality of the audiovisual image be acknowledged. Film and video (like any medium of mechanical reproduction) tend to fix and generalize their objects; but film is also capable of the same volatility that char acterizes the fetish. Film/video is able to reactivate the presence of the fetishized object, as the (audio)visual image yields to the things it cannot represent; and in the process, as I will explain, the image ceases to exist as a fetish.
Sense Knowledge and Cultural Translation
When objects are extracted from their cultural contexts, it is often their nonvisual qualities that are the first to be forgotten. The cultural history encoded in nonvisual sense memory gets lost in any kind of intercultural movement, but especially in the diasporic movement to the modernized West, or from rural areas to metropolitan cen ters. This is an effect not only of Western ocularcentrism but also of commodification. Curators of visual art note that the recoding of a useful object as a high-art commodity tends to strip away its nonvisual aspects. As Laura Trippi writes, "Conventions of fine art dis play, taking objects out of context, stimulate a tendency to experi ence vision as if it operated objectively, independently of the other senses and even outside the contingencies of history" (1993) -11 Simi-
larly, Constance Classen (1993) notes that museu ms' practice of stor- 115 ing artifacts behind glass recontextualizes these objects as primarily visual, and thus often misinterprets the sort of knowledge they pro^ vided in their traditional cultures. She uses the example of a basket ® from the Desana tribe of Colombia, a culture, she demonstrates, that o B has a complex organization of knowledge based on symbolisms of o color, odor, temperature, and flavor. "Though a Desana basket, for ^ instance, is evidently a multi-sensory object, it wou ld never occur H to the ordinary Westerner viewing one in a mu se um that meaning 5* might lie not only in its form and function, but also in its texture, taste, and smell" (136). Fetishism as an intercultural relation involves a tremendous amount of translation, decipherment, and excavation. And ulti mately there is no possibility of getting to a truth about either cul ture, for the fetish is produced only in the movement between cul tures. Beharry's excavations, for example, are not just about finding the Indian "voice" silenced by generations of life in the West. They are also excavations of many histories that get lost in cultural trans lation, histories that are repressed at home as well. In Seeing Is Be lieving, in the reading of the meanings fossilized in her own skin, she reveals a mixed legacy that includes a Chinese grandfather, undoi ng the myth of racial purity that matters both in cross-cultural "ex planation" and in intracultural lineages. In the performance "Ashes to Flowers," Beharry combines humble folk rituals with Brahmin ceremony, making a carnival of Hinduism in a way that may be quite offensive to some people. When she makes chappatis with rose water and kneads rose petals into them, she is not only mixing peasant food with ritual offerings, but also allowing folk rituals and women's work to erupt into high Brahmin traditions. Performed at (the appropriately named) Gallery Burning in Mont real, "Ashes to Flowers" addresses the difficulty of holding on to an ever-heavier object inscribed with indecipherable meaning, and undertaking the burden of translation. The earnest attempt at trans lation of Seeing Is Believing gave way, in the performance, to a dis missal of the very possibility of translation. In the early part of the performance, Beharry attempted to recite a poem she had written in Urdu. Like a child trying to rem ember a lesson, she stamped and tossed her head with frustration, her eyes wet with relief when she did manage to resolve a phrase. But she did not translate the poem
to the group of friends gathered in the gallery, none of whom under stood Urdu. It was only for us non-Urdu speakers to experience the painful difficulty of excavation. (When Beharry performs this ritual for audiences of Indian descent, the reaction is no doubt quite differ ent—sorrow, perhaps, at the cultural atrophy evident in her effort.) Such a renunciation suggests an acceptance of untranslatability as part of the postcolonial experience. Beharry's working process itself is antifetishistic, built on a sus picion of the reification that happens when an artwork enters dis course. (Whereas fetishes, as I have argued, are live things that can telescope back out to processes and relationships, reification re duces processes and relationships to things.) One must obtain per mission from Beharry to write about her work. She does not circu late images of her performances or stills from her videos, but issues a single photogr aph, of her cupp ed hands holding a lily of the valley. Though she operates in the context of the Canadian art community, she has taken pains to work differently from most career artists. This course has been possible in part because of the still fairly generous Canadian art funding system, which enabled Beharry to pursue her practice in residencies and the like without being pressured to de liver salable products. She refuses to document her performances, preferring instead that information about her work be spread in the conversations of the people who have witnessed it. The statement she gives whenever required to represent herself in print is "My work is small, simple, a nd travels by wor d of mouth . I trust in it." Beharry's projects typically erase their own process but leave traces of the changes that have occurred, often by substituting olfac tory or tactile traces for visual evidence. They may include burying objects, burning objects (including, to this critic's consternation, videotapes), scattering a pattern carefully traced on the floor, and otherwise ensuring that the record of the event remains only in the memory of those who witness it or hear about it. She is a cura tor's nightmare. When Beharry was asked to create an installation at the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology around its collection of First Nations artifacts, she proposed to surround the objects in their glass cases with chappatis cut into the shapes of hands (Be harry 1996). The museum curators were horrified because the bread would have attracted insects; but as Beharry points out, the little
44- Publicity photograph, courtesy of
Shauna Beharry.
bugs are already in the walls and carpet of the museum, and her chappatis would only have made them visible! In this way Beharry's work carries out Classen's and Trippi's critiques of museum practice by enabling the smelly and gustatory processes that go unseen and disavowed in an ocularcentric culture—if only by appealing to the sense of smell of weevils and other insects. Beharry's work, in short, is resolutely material in that it resists representation, and yet reso lutely immaterial in that she erases its traces as soon as possible. And interestingly, the way these traces linger the longest is in the form of smell. Paper and flowers burnt at one of Beharry's perfor mance spaces leave their acrid fragrance for days after. Sites where she has worked retain the scent of incense that she buried in the walls, detectable even under a fresh coat of paint. Friends receive in the mail poems scented with rose oil, or envelopes full of ashes that burst onto their shirts. The artist's grief in Seeing Is Believing is heightened by resent ment of the Western cultural emphasis on visuality. The photographs of her mother seem to rob Beharry of actual memories of her. As such, the loss she is trying to address not only concerns the inti macy between mother and daughter but also has to do with a kind of knowledge. Memory, she suggests, can be lost in translation, espe-
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cially in the difference between cultures' regimes of sense knowl edge. Beharry's use of video to critique pho tography is a pointed reference to the way visual records steal memories, precisely in their reified concreteness. Photography has a specific cultural history, which includes its ethnographic use as one of the technologies of mi perial domination. Nevertheless, the Western snapshot has achieved ascendancy in most cultures, including the top echelons of "thirdworld" cultures, as the way of coding private representation. As Behar ry has stressed, visuality is also the dominant mode of knowledge in Brahmin ritual, or the practices of the upper caste within Hindu ism. It is no problem, or not such a great problem, to put a Brahmin ritual on tape, say. The rituals that get lost in the act of immigration and cultural translation are the non-Brahmin, the peasant rituals. 12 Beharry's performances and videos excavate a form of knowl edge that patriarchal cultures tend to dismiss, namely, the sensu ous knowledge that pertains to Indian (diasporan) women's daily lives. These are not experiences that would be immediately acces sible to any woman. It is not possible to assert a feminine kinship with Beharry, or with the women whose lives are implicit in her work, on the basis of identifying with some universal female experi ence. Her source of memory, the feel and smell of a sari on her skin, is quite specific to a particular group of women. However, though we the viewers may not be privy to the particular information Be harry learns from putting on her mother's sari, Seeing Is Believing does give us license to value other intimate, sensory experiences as sources of knowledge. Her mother's skin touched the sari, and now the sari touches her: knowledge is transmitted tactilely rather than visually. To be able to value this kind of knowledge it is necessary to think of the skin as something that can distinguish, know, and remember. What Beharry gives us in Seeing Is Believing is not an introduction to Indian women's sense of touch, but an awareness of the importance of the knowledge of the senses in whatever our cul ture of origin might be. As we begin to seek our own sense knowl edges, we can evaluate how our own cultures assimilate or filter out the knowledge of the senses. In chapter 4 1 will explore further how the sensorium is organized by culture. "Sensual abandon" is a phrase of Enlightenment subjectivity, im plying that the senses (except maybe vision, and possibly hearing) dull the powers of the intellect. It implies that the Orientalist desire
for the sense experience of other cultures is in part a desire to stop 119 thinking, as though sensory knowledge is radically opposed to intel lectual knowledge. But when, in "Ashes to Flowers," Beharry lights H incense, washes our hands with rose water, and encourages us to ® dance, she is not encouraging us to "abandon" ourselves to our bod- £D ies but to respect our bodies' capacities for knowledge. This is a o knowledge that requires just as mu ch effort to acquire as intellectual 0 knowledge. The "Oriental" trip sh e gives us is not an opportunity H to breathe in the smells and let it all hang out—an interpretation B OQ she circumvents when shortly into the performance sh e changes from romantic shalwar kameez into a frumpy slip and housedress— but a time to do a particular sort of work where bodies and minds work together. This appeal to olfactory, tactile, and other nonvisual bodily knowledges makes many par ticipants uncomfortable, since these knowledges are little valued or cultivated in modern Western contexts, even in the art world.13 Even if we respect them, we may not know ho w to make sense of them. In short, stirring u p the hier archy of the senses is not a chance to play dumb: in fact it's quite exhausting.
The Aura of the Transnational Object
Pietz's archaeology of the fetish is essential to a critique of the hier archical organization of the senses. Enlightenment thinkers (and many before them) separated knowledge from the body, reinforcing the hierarchy of the senses whereby vision is valued as furthest from the body and closest to the intellect, while smell and taste are con sidered the most bodily and least intellectual of the senses. (More on this hierarchy in chapter 4.) I propose w e turn those thinkers "on their heads" and attempt to practice fetishistic thinking. The fetish, by partaking physically of the thing it represents, threatens the idea that only the distance senses lend themselves to knowledge. Fetishism is a form of belief based in and dependent upon the body. As such it is denounced in the majority of world philosophies and religions. But thinking fetishistically allows us to take embodied knowledge seriously. In addition, to be dependent upon an object affirms not only the materiality of one's body but also the incompleteness of one's self: it suggests that meaning in heres i n the communication between self, objects, and others rather
tha n in a commu nication mediated by the mind alone. The nontranscendence of African fetishism, as construed by Enlightenment-era Europeans, represents a strategic way of reconceiving material re lations among people. Because they make the individual dependent upon bodily contact for spiritual power, fetishes, like other auratic objects, threaten the autonomy of the subject. Hence the Dutch ex plorer De Brosses denounced fetishism for draining the humanity from the worshipper (according to Mitchell 1986,191): in fetishism, "hu manity" or subjectivity was a function of the exchange among the worshippers and their objects. Fetishes are fellow-travelers. They are fundamentally like Balasz's "dumb objects . . . whose fate is bound up with your own" ([1923] 1972) to which the close-up bears witness. Fetishistic subjectivity does not inhere in individual souls but rather is distributed among bodies, objects, an d places. Throughout th is chapter I have been referring to objects that travel as auratic. Through their travels and through being owned and used, objects become unique. The transnational object is precisely auratic in that it testifies to "the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced" (Benjamin 1968c, 221). In the religious practices from which the word aura was borrowed, it meant the presence of the sacred. In this way an auratic object is a fetish. It holds within it the presence of the sacred, concentrated in the object through some initial contact or use. As I have noted, the auratic character of things is their ability not simply to awaken memories in an individual, but to contain a social history in frag menta ry form. The bottles of oil in Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls, the carnations of Love, Women and Flowers, the sweet pota toes in Great Girl, Walid Ra'ad's precious family objects, Rea Tajiri's heirloom brooch in History and Memory, and the fabric whose sur face Shauna Beharry searches in Seeing Is Believing are all auratic in that they have made physical contact with histories—histories too volatile and disruptive to be related as simple stories. The works I have described explore this auratic presence by following the ob jects back to their source of power. Yet aura is not merely a human presence that narrative uncoils from the object like a ball of string. Objects also have a life indepen dent of the human relations they encode, beyond their discursive
and narrative significance. Their materiality itself is significant. As Peter Pels provocatively suggests,
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Things may, indeed, be enlivened by their forms, uses and trajectories withtr CD out recourse to materiality, through memory, written representation, or CD other forms of symbolic action, but that is another realization of the social g o life of things than that mediated by materiality itself, in which their forms, C3 uses, and trajectories are apprehended, like habitual practice, "without re- >-* H course to discourse" . .. or representation. (1995,9; quoting Pierre Bourdieu) ££ &
Meaning resides in objects, as habit stores memory in the body. How can we account for the way meaning is mediated materially? Most current Marxist criticism has deteriorated into a dry positiv ism on one hand, and a Baudrillardian dazzlement at the world of self-replicating signs on the other. This, I would argue, results from Marx's own campaign to demystify the commodity. Paradoxically, in making legible the social relations encoded in an object, one tends to lose the materiality of the object. The continuing appeal of Benjamin's work is partly due to his provocative effort to both deand re-mystify the object, to incorporate its inexpressible and in tangible properties at the same time that he read it politically. Very controversially, Benjamin fused Cabbalist and Marxist understand ings of how meaning is immanent in the things of the world—im manent but veiled according to the Cabbalists, imman ent bu t reified according to the Marxists (Buck-Morss 1989,235-40). Benjamin was roundly criticized by Adorno, Brecht, and later critics such as Rolf Tiedemann and Jiirgen Habermas for these attempts to fuse mysti cism with Marxism (245-49). Most of these ideas remained unpub lished, or expressed only in hints in Benjamin's published essays (Hansen 1987, Buck-Morss 1989). But since the time Benjamin was taken to task, intellectuals' faith in our ability to read the world wholly in terms of signs has waned. Perhaps now it is possible to contemp late how objects mea n in them selves—to contemplate their aura—without being accused of obfuscation. If this is mysticism, it is an attempt to account for an enchantment of the world different from the opiate aura of the com modity. It is an attempt to understand how meaning is conveyed through physical presence as well as through intellectual significa tion. The films and videos I have been examining demonstrate that
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many recollection-objects are irreducibly material and irreducibly auratic. To understand how objects mean in their materiality requires that we under take a tactile epistemology, to which I will retu rn in the next chapter.
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The Dissolution of the Fetish
Earlier I remarked that when a recollection-object, like other kinds of recollection-image, successfully engages with memory, it engages with communal storytelling and its "radioactive" quality is neutral ized. The way a fetish object accomplishes this, while it is not sexual per se, has to do with how the fetish is libidinally (autoerotically?) located upon the body. The dissolution of the fetish is accomplished by its reembodiment. When sense memory is revived in the b o d y when the body remembers—the recollection-object ceases to exist as such. Borrowing from Michel Leiris's beautiful essay on Giacometti, Pietz ponders the relation of fetishes—and successful works of art— to the body: The fetish is . . . first of all, something intensely personal, whose truth is experienced as a substantial movement from "inside" the self (the self as totalized through an impassioned body, a "body without organs") into the self-limited morphology of a material object situated in space "outside." Works of art are true fetishes only if they are material objects at least as in tensely personal as the water of tears. (1985,11-12) Pietz suggests that the movement from the inside to the outside— the process of concretization—is what makes a fetish a fetish. Tears are an example: they are a material expression of an internal state. The thing about tears, though, is that they do not remain a concrete object; they dissolve back into the body. Pietz provocatively refers in passing to the "body without organs" as the body that produces fetishes, or art. Only a body that is not libidinally fixated in terms of par ticular parts can invest with desire something outside. I picture the Deleuze-Guattarian "body without organs" (1983) as something like a water balloon. You can willfully twist shapes onto its surface, play with t hem u ntil they lose their fascination, and t hen undo them and make others. This sort of libidinal investment, the schizoanalysts argue, is the only one that is built around desire rather than
need. The appeal of this model is that, voluntaristic though it cer- 123 tainly is, it allows for the strange and contingent ways subjects form attachments. The body without organs produ ces fetishes galore, but _j it does not fixate upon any one of them; they dissolve back into ° its undifferentiated surface. Similarly, the fetishes produced in the CD movement bet ween cultures are only transitory markers of a brief o relation that will probably change. (Hence the perverseness of col0 lecting "third-world" artifacts as tho ugh they are markers of a static H condition, as the collectors in In and Out of Africa and Imagin5* ing Indians do: suc h fetishism harks back to an impossible moment OT before colonial an d postcolonial relations of cultural mixing and transformation.) The body without organs is playful toward the ob ject of desire, having a "double consciousness of absorbed credulity and degraded or distanced incredulity" (Pietz 1985,14) that permits both investment and critique. The fetish that is produced in the movement between cultures is a concrete expression of the state of longing produced when what was inside moves to the outside, when what was taken for granted of one's culture becomes an object of contemplation. Like the fetish produced by an "impassioned body," these only exist as fetishes for as long as they contain a cultural meaning that cannot exist com fortably in the new cultural context. Let me retur n to Winnicott's ([1951] 1958) theory of the transitional object to explore how the fetish is produced on the body without organs. Is the transitional object—the comforting blanket, the TV that lulls the child to sleep, for that matter, the smell of a familiar food—part of the body or not? Certainly it is part of the body with out organs, the body that makes itself anew by organizing itself with relation to an external object. The subject's identity comes to be dis tributed between the self and the object. Yet it is the self, not the object, that is in transition. The object remains the same, although it takes on layers of meaning that later, as the subject acquires some new sort of subjecthood, dissolve away. Recall how fetishes are produced in the space between cultures. The transnational object is a transitional object not only for the per son in transition from one cultural reality to another, but also for the one whose cultural reality is entered and changed. The object becomes a means of both of their projections about the other cul ture. As it moves, it is bound to become a lot heavier before it gets
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lighter. Here is the difference between fetishes and fossils, then. Fos sils retain the shape of the cultural upheaval, perpetually inviting g decoding of past conflicts. Their "radioactive" quality may dimin p£ ish as connections are made to the historical stratum in which they j§ were created, but they do not go away. Fetishes, although they are *o similarly dense wit h meaning, tend to dissolve away after the need 3 for th em has dissipated. a. The function of transitional objects is decidedly not to aid assimiH lation to another culture. For they do not simply bring an aspect of their place of origin to a new site; they also make strange the place into whi ch they arrive. These cultural fossils are radioactive because they bring back lost histories in which both origin and destination are implicated. They reveal the radical hybridity already present at both sites. Cinematic images, as transitional objects, retain some indexical trace of an originary event. They do not transparently reflect it, but obscure it. These images are transitional objects insofar as they are dense, sedimented, crystallized. They become unnecessary once they are dissolved. The works discussed in this chapter bring the fetishistic, auratic character of the traveling object to its apex—and then they dissolve its power, by connecting it to memory, changing fossil-images to recollection-images. I hope to have demonstrated a combination of cinematic qualities and practices that both materializes and dissolves the fetishlike and fossil-like quality of the image. The emphasis on the nonvisual quali ties of the image in History and Memory, Seeing Is Believing, and other works turns our attention away from the kind of fetishism most commonly (and pejoratively) discussed in cinema, visual fetishism. At the same time it calls attention to other material presences borne forth by the image, such as touch and smell: a process of sensory replacement that I will explore in the following two chapters. The "life cycle" of the fetish is also supported by Beharry's refusal to let her moving images circulate, often to the point of destruction. Her practices both acknowledge the dense aura surrounding the image and aid in its dissolution. Let me make some generalizations about the fetishistic quality of documentary. In its use as described by Pietz, the fetish seems to fix the value of those crisis moments when incommensurable his-
tories meet. But in bringing these histories together the fetish also renders each of them unstable. The works by Beharry, Tajiri, Ra'ad, and others are poi nted examples of how docum ent ary can exploit cinema's volatile, fetishlike quality, but all documentary has the potential to act in this way. All documentary images are fetishes, insofar as they are indexes of the event documented. However, they do not transparently reflect it, but opaquely encode it. When documentary is accused, as it often is, of fetishizing the people and events it represents, this is because it maintains the fetish in a state of fixity. But the fetish object may be coaxed to unfold into memory, as when these artists search a photograph, a scar, or a piece of tar paper for the history it encodes. As the fetishistic relations these objects embody are worked through, they cease to be fetishes. Another ex ample is Shauna Beharry's chappati hands. In "Ashes to Flowers," Beharry makes chappatis, cuts them out in the shape of hands, two right two left, smears them with the red paste used to mark a bindi on the forehead, and places them on an altar made of rice and vaguely in the shape of a woman's body. What is shocking about these actions is the significance of the red hands. I had known that brides' hands are decorated with henna in Hindu weddings. But I only learned later that, in the traditional practice of suttee, the last thing the widow does before she steps onto her hus band's pyre is to dip her hands in henna, red like blood, and mak e the mark of her two red hands on a stone. So the two sets of red hands Beharry made are not only about the tactile lineage of learn ing, from her mother and her mother's mothers, how to make chap patis. Nor do they refer simply to the cultur al dislocations that made the simple recipe, wit h all its concomitant responsibilities, difficult for the third-generation daughter to learn (as she tells us, "My father said, if you make nice round chappatis you'll get a husband"). They also pay homage to the generations of women in her history who have been forced to burn. For those who know about the red hands, this point in the performance is physically nauseating. Beharry could not and did not want to embrace her Hindu heri tage uncritically, for it is a heritage that includes the cruel subjuga tion of women. In her acts of excavation she cannot discover a lost history of women, for the women are gone for good. She can only cut through the geological layers and make inert histories volatile by
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crashing them into each other. Beharry is not the product of any one discourse but carries a number of irreconcilable histories with her. Her chappati hands are not the fragrant bread of nostalgia; they are radioactive fossils that destabilize everything that comes into con tact with them.
3 The memory of touch
If cinema does not give us the presence of the body and cannot give it to us, this is perhaps also because it sets itself a different objective: it spreads an "experimental night" or a white space over us; it works with "dancing seeds" and a "luminous dust"; it affects the visible with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural perception. What it produces in this way is the genesis of an un kn ow n body. —Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image In the previous chapter I wrote that Shauna Beharry's Seeing Is Be lieving, a tape made in mou rning for her mother, uses the audi o visual image to convey the tactile memory of her mo ther's skin. Here let me describe how she achieves this. The tape is built around a single still image of the artist wearing her mother's sari. While Beharry tells her story, the camera has been looking ever more closely ("focusing" is not the right word) at the fabric of the sari in a detail of the photo, following the folds of silk as they dissolve into grain and resolve again. Eventually the tape keys in a smaller, sharp-focus image of the portrait, superimposing it on the folds of the sari. The difference between these two ways of seeing is startling. I realize that the tape has been using my vision as though it were a sense of touch; I have been brushing the (image of the) fabric with the skin of my eyes, rather than looking at it. Beharry says she wanted to "squeeze the touchability out of the photo" (1996), and she has: the difference between the senses collapses slightly.
45, 46> and 47- Stills from Seeing Is Believing
The switch between what I will term hap tic and optical vision de - 129 scribes the movement between a relationship of touch and a visual H one. This experience of looking, together wit h Beharry's compelling words, makes us reflect that memory may be encoded in touch, ® sound, per hap s smell, more than in vision. The disparity bet ween CD the searching movements of the camera and her wistful voice on the o sound track, between visual and audio, creates a poignant aware0 ness of the missing sense of touch. H n
Beyond the Audiovisual
I concentrate in this and the next chapter on the ways cinema can appeal to senses that it cannot technically represent: the senses of touch, smell, and taste. This focus is not some intellectual game but an extension of my concern throughout this work to show how and why cinema might express the inexpressible. The two previous chapters began to explore the representation of memory in intercultural cinema. I suggested that cinema is able to evoke the particularly hard-to-represent memories of people who move between cultures, by pointing beyond the limits of sight and sound. The works I discussed show the dilemma that occurs when words, sounds, and images trap as much as they free: when giving expression to some things that are cinema's proper territory pre vents the expression of something else. In chapter 11 argued that the characteristic gaps of time-image cinema offer a way to repre sent memories that are effaced from dominant cinematic represen tations. I suggested, following Deleuze, that sometimes the disjunc tion between the visible and the verbal may point to meanings that lie between them. But, as the films I examined began to demon strate, often meaning escapes the audiovisual registers altogether. In chapter 2,1 suggested that memory is encoded in objects through contact, and examined films and videos that attempt to reconstruct those memories by engaging with the object. In this chapter, I will ar gue that cinema itself appeals to contact—to embodied knowledge, and to the sense of touch in particular—in order to recreate memo ries. A story "bears the marks of the storyteller muc h as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter's hand" (Benjamin 1968b, 92); so cinema bears the marks of sense memories that do not find their way into audiovisual expression.
Let me recall once more the originary fossil-like image in History and Memory— the image that is for Rea Tajiri what the madeleine was for Proust—that of the woman filling the canteen. The second time the image plays, as the woman (Tajiri, playing her mother) kneels in the dust, we hear the sound of water splashing: she rinses her face with a grimace of relief, as though this visit to the pump wer e her only resp ite from the days of imprisonment, dust, and wait ing. Her mother's only memory, then, is a tactile memory, of the heat rising and the coolness of water on her hands and face. The film al ludes to this level of perception through image and, especially, the gurgling sound of the running water: the tactile memory is encoded audiovisually. It is not accidental that certain experiences are most likely to be "recorded" only in the nonaudiovisual registers of touch, smell, and taste. The fabric of everyday experience that tends to elude verbal or visual records is encoded in these senses. Senses that are closer to the body, like the sense of touch, are capable of storing power ful memories that are lost to the visual. Senses whose images can not be recorded (the primitive experiments of virtual reality not withstanding) are repositories of private memory. Leslie Devereaux writes of the experience of wearing a tight woven belt, which Zinacanteca women of Guatemala do from the very day of their birth, as an experience that is encoded only by the body. Like the fossil ob ject/images of the previous chapter, the belt bears within it a great complex of meanings: Without the frost under my foot, the grassy patches between forest and cornfield would not be good pasturage for sheep. Without the baa-ing of the sheep, the wool in the belt would be gone. Without the truck the colourfast red dye from German companies in Guatemala would have to come by muletrain, and would be too costly and scarce. Without the woodsmoke from the disappearing oak forests, how would the weaver cook her corn into tortillas? So it is clear that this belt is actually composed of an infinitude of non-belt elements. It has no separate existence apart from this web of non belt elements. (1995, 57-58) Devereaux does not attribute to the woven belt some ancient and im mutable wisdom: it contains the traffic permitting German dyes, the disappearance of the forests, and other signs of changing Zinacan-
te ca life w i th in its tr ad it io na l form . It is a wi tn e ss to all th es e hi st o-
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ries, and insofar as it is, the se histo ries are im pr in te d on Zi na ca nte ca
wo me n' s bod ies (Deve reaux onc e saw tha t he r friend's wai st bo re
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totically, and in the process it may seem to give up its proper (audio-
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visu al) be in g. In wh at follows I em ph as iz e th e mu lti sen so ry quality of pe rc ep tion, the involvement of all the senses even in the audiovisual act of cinematic viewing, in order to shift the discussion of visuality from th e optica l te rm s tha t usu all y pr ed om in at e. (As I will exp lain , a n optical image in th e se nse th at I us e it, bo rr ow in g from Aloi s Riegl, is different from Deleuze's term optical image; in fact, co n fusing though it may sound, it is the haptic image that falls under Deleuze's category of optical images.) My exploration of other sen
sory knowledges in this chapter and the next is an inquiry into how the image calls up multisensory experience. It is not a search for a way to reproduce multisensory imagery. I will not be look ing primarily at technologies that attempt to reproduce the sense of smell (for example, Odorama) or touch (for example, the Power Glove)—in effect, movement-image strategies for evoking smell and touch—but rather examining how audiovisual media evoke these other senses within their own constrain ts, in a manner more conso nant with Deleuze's model of time-image cinema. I will argue that intercultural cinema has especially good reason to push the media beyond their audiovisual bounds, perverse though this may be. Let me begin this discussion with some caveats. By now, visuality has been blamed for as many evils as, at other times, capitalism and the weather have been. I will argue, however, that the critique need not be extended to all forms of visuality. It may apply to the visuality typical of capitalism, consumerism, surveillance, and ethnography: a sort of instrumental vision that uses the thing seen as an object for knowledge and control. Yet it seems the critique of visuality has come to a turning point. A number of theorists are reconsidering vision by classifying it as instrumental and noninstrumental, objec tifying and intersubjective, vision aligned with mastery and vision that allows its object to remain mysterious (see Levin 1993 for sev-
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eral such thoughtful reconsiderations). Similarly, my project here is not to condemn all vision as bent on mastery, nor indeed to cong demn all mastery, but to open up visuality along the continua of the £ distant and the embodied, and the optical and the haptic. I will sug£ gest that a form of visuality that yields to the thing seen, a vision that *o is not merely cognitive but acknowledges its location in the body, •£ seems to escape the attribution of mastery. © Also, let me note that there are good reasons for the dominance H of vision in nearly every world culture. A certain degree of separa tion from the body is necessary in order for our bodies to function. Imagine if our perceptions were so embodied that we could feel every step of our digestive process, the twitching of our neurons. We would be so attuned to the universe within that it would be im possible to focus on the world around us. If we wer e aware of the functioning of our spleens, the constant activity upon the mucous membranes of our nostrils, the traffic on our synaptic highways, we would certainly not be able to drive a car, let alone distinguish percep tions most necessary for survival. Drew Leder argues in The Absent Body (1992) that a certain degree of "alienation" from our bodies is crucial. Vision, as the sense generally most separate from the body in its ability to perceive over distances, is the central sense to this necessary alienation. Leder's term "the absent body" makes overt use of the Latin root of absence, whi ch means not a void but "being-away," a being that is away from itself. He argues that the lived body combines first-person and third-person perspectives, in order to have the distance from itself necessary for functioning. Similarly, while I am remarking upon the rise of interest in tac tile forms of knowledge, I must note that a regime of knowledge in which tactility reigned supreme would have its ethical and epistemological problems (as well as make driving a car almost im possible). Tactility cannot be a distance sense, even in the foggiest valleys and most polluted cities where one can really touch the air. A configuration of the senses that would value sense informa tion perceived within the body, on the body's surface, and at close, middle, and far distances from the body would seem to be an ideal alternative to the current skewing of the modern sensorium in favor of distance. Vision, in fact, is capable of almost all these sorts of perception. Finally, it is worth considering that since humans have developed many prosthetic ma chines, from telescopes to magnetic-
resonance imaging, that render the world optical for us , we have the 133 luxury, and perhaps the necessity, to explore other sorts of visuality ^ as we have not before. These caveats made, I should note that in recent years artists in <*> many mediums have taken renewed interest in the tactile and other a> sensory capacities of their work, often to the diminishment of its o visual appeal. Scholars in philosophy, ar t history, anthropology, and 0 cognitive science have begun to posit an epistemology based on the g3 sense of touch. Theorists in many disciplines have mad e con neco tions between the Cartesian privileging of vision, insofar as it is the most "cerebral" of the senses, and a destructive desire for self- and social control. Historians of vision and visuality note connections between the structure of industrial an d postindustrial societies and the reconfiguration of the senses, with implications for militarism and other forms of social control.1 The critique of ocularcentrism has a considerable legacy among feminist theorists, who link vision to the distanciation from the body and to the objectification and con trol of self and others. Many of the feminist critiques of vision and control are grounded in psychoanalytic theory, while others take a more historical, sometimes Foucauldian approach to the uses of visuality.2 Other critics, suc h as Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) and Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996), have noted the specifically Western character of visuality as one that objectifies others, isolates self from others, and attempts to master external and internal worlds. A significant number of intercultural film- and videomakers em bed a critique of visuality in their work. Often they draw from cri tiques of ethnography. This well-known critique asserts that ethno graphic photography and film have objectified non-Western cultures and made a spectacle of them; they have reduced cultures to their visual appearance; and they have used vision as part of a general will to knowledge of the other as a means to power. 3 Many films and videos critique the will to visually master another culture. Some put up real or metaphoric smokescreens that obscure the view of a culture. Others suggest that the most important aspects of the cul ture or the story are invisible. In all cases, these works trouble the relationship between vision and knowledge. Pointing to the limits of visual knowledge, they frustrate the passive absorption of infor mation, instead encouraging th e viewer to engage more actively and self-critically with the image.
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One of the most important innovators of the critique of ethno graphic visuality has been Trinh T. Minh-ha. Trinh's films ReiAssemg blage (1982) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), like Chris E Marker's Sans soleil (1982), Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), Alain j§ Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959), and Peter Kubelka's Unsere *o Afrikareise (1961-66), use both poetic and aggressive strategies to 3 compel the viewer to consider the destructive effects of believing that one can know another cultur e or another time through visual 0 H information alone. The legacy of her experiments has nourished thoughtful reflections on the possibility of visual knowledge, as well as founding a generation of sometimes derivative works. By the time of Shoot for the Contents (1991), Trinh proposes a model of vision based on the Chinese game that gives the film its title: do not believe what you see, but think of the image as a box whose contents you must infer. At the same time, Victor Masayesva Jr. has been chal lenging the destructive effects of ethnographic filmmaking in works such as Ritual Clowns (1988), which shows how ethnographers de picted Hopi rituals as the childish antics of a primitive people. In Hopiit (1982) and Ram Hakim Hopiit (1985) Masayesva offered a more appropriate way to image Hopi life that protected sacred ac tivities from the view of outsiders and represented the most impor tant aspects of Hopi life obliquely, for example, by using the life cycle of corn, the Hopi staff of life, to structure Ram Hakim Hopiit, an oral history of the Hopi people. I have already discussed, in chapters 1 and 2, how a lack of faith in the visual motivates many artists to treat the image as a mine (and a minefield) that they must excavate in order to find mean ingful stories. As I noted in chapter 1, the Black British workshops Black Audio and Sankofa developed sophisticated critiques of the complicity of visual knowledge with official discourse. Works such as Black Audio's Handsworth Songs (1986), Reece Auguiste's Twi light City (1989), John Akomfrah's Testament (1988) and Who Needs a Heart? (1991), Isaac Julien's The Passion of Remembrance (1986) and Looking for Langston (1989), and others by these workshops approached the visual archive warily and interrogated it for what it could not tell. Some more recent works that begin their histori cal excavation with a suspicion of the image include videos "about" Palestine and Lebanon: Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum's Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction
to the end of an
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48. Frame enlargements from Hopiit. Courtesy of Victor Masayesva Jr.
Speaking for oneself . . . speaking for others (1990), Jayce Salloum and Walid Ra'ad's Talaeen a funuub (Up to the South) (1993), Salloum's This Is Not Beirut (1994), and Jalal Toufic's Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green (1995). As the filmmakers of Black Audio
and Sankofa suspect the image's complicity with official racist dis course about Blacks in Britain, so these works suspect the ability to represent the Middle East in a Western context already saturated with images that derisively dismiss the Palestinian struggle and the Lebanese war. In these works blurry images shot from moving cars,
49 and 50. Stills from Aletheia. Courtesy of Tran T. Kim-Trang.
uninformative shots of damaged buildin gs, and seemingly irrelevant details challenge viewers' desire to read the truth of the Palestinian and Lebanese conflicts with Israel (and the West) from visual images alone. Another artist who initiates her works with a wry suspicion of the images that already contain her (Chinese) culture in the West is Yau Ching, in Flow (1993) and Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You? (1991). This body of work does not necessarily offer a plenitud e of ne w sense experience, but rather, by muffling the ex perience of the visual, points to the possibility of less ocularcentric ways of seeing. There are also a number of intercultural works specifically about
5i. Still from Ekleipsis
Western visual technologies. In Pam Tom's Two Lies (1989) a Chi nese American woman gets plastic surgery to widen her eyes, and the film plays on the metaphor of impaired vision. The "Blindness Series" by Tran T. Kim-Trang, thus far Aletheia (1992), Operculum (1993), Kore (1994), Ocularis: Eye Surrogates (1997), and Ekleipsis (1998), explores the use of visual technologies in objectification and surveillance. But even in their critique of instrumental vision, the tapes begin to present to the viewer a different kind of visuality. Aletheia, for example, is a tape "about" the desire to bli nd oneself. Yet it is dense with visual detail—it layers many visual images as well as sound tracks; it begins with a shot of a piece of Braille writ ing; it overlays shots from a car window with a fragment of a map of Los Angeles. The effect of this surface density is to invite a kind of vision that spreads out over the surface of the image instead of penetrating into depth. Even the long quotes from Trinh an d Fanon that appear in the tape begin to dissolve into a pattern on the surface of the image. Ekleipsis deals with a group of Cambodian wo men living in Long Beach, California, all of whom have hysterical blind ness dating to the experiences with the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that made them refugees. What is most striking about Iran's oblique telling of the story is that the images that illustrate it cycle by in brief intervals, separated by fades to white. Images of jewelry and watches (which the fleeing women hid in their vaginas), eyeglasses, a stupa, and a pineapple (which Tran notes Cambodians equated with the Khmer Rouge: having eyes everywhere [1997]), appear to vision for only a second and are then obscured again. Tran thus
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mimics the vision of one who has suffered so mu ch that she must shield herself from perception, to whom images occur in the briefest of flashes and th en are reabsorbed by an anaesthetic forgetting.
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A Tactile Epistemology: Mimesis
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Tactile epistemologies conceive of knowledge as something gained not on the model of vision but through physical contact. Many of the sources for tactile epistemology may be regarded as unrigorous, romantic, or downright spooky: the Cabbalistic undertones of Wal ter Benjamin's theories of representation (Hansen 1987, Buck-Morss 1989); the exoticizing longing of anthropologists for other cultures' ways of knowing (Jay 1993b and the lively exchange between Taussig 1994, Stoller 1994, and Jay 1994); Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) nonlinear musings on navigation and insects, viewed askance by many academics; the perceived essentialism of feminists who de scribe a form of representation grounded in the body (see Grosz 1994, introduction, for a rejoinder). My effort here to describe a form of cinematic representation based on the sense of touch may also be susceptible to some of these criticisms. I would like to keep those critiques in mind but hold them in check until later in this chapter. Tactile epistemology involves a relationship to the world of mi mesis, as compared to symbolic representation. Mimesis, from the Greek mimeisthai, "to imitate," suggests that one represents a thing by acting like it. Mimesis is thus a form of represen tation based on a particular, material contact at a par ticular moment, such as that be tween a child at play and an airplane (Benjamin 1978a), a moth and the bark of a tree (Caillois 1984), or a Songhay sorcerer and a spirit (Stoller 1989). Mimesis, in which one calls up the presence of the other materially, is an indexical, rather than iconic, relation of simi larity. According to Erich Auerbach (1953), mimesis requires a lively and responsive relationship between listener/reader and story/text, such that each time a story is retold it is sensuously remade in the body of the listener. Auerbach was describing the relationship be tween reader an d written text; we might expect the relationship be tween "viewer" and the more physical object of cinema to be more convincingly mimetic. Mimesis is a concept thoroughly rooted in Western thought (it ap pears in Aristotle). Although Deleuze and the philosopher s upon
whom his cinem a theory is based, Bergson and Peirce, do not use 139 the term mimesis, it is quite consistent wit h all their conceptions of the relationship between the world and the sign or the image. Like _3 memory in Bergson's theory, mimesis is mediated by the body. As ° Peirce's semiotics presumes a continuum between more immediate CD signs and more symbolic signs, mimesis presu mes a continuum beo tween the actuality of the world and the production of signs about 0 t-b
that world. 4 This excursion into increasingly bodily forms of representation is thu s consistent wit h the theories of representation and memory with which I began. Mimetic representation, then, exists on a continuum with more symbolic forms of representation. It lies at the other pole from the symbolic representation characteristic of contemporary urban and postindustrial society. The highly symbolic world in which we find ourselves nowadays is in part a function of the capitalist tendency to render meanings as easily consumable and translatable signs, a tendency that in turn finds its roots in Enlightenment idealism. Consequently, critics of capitalism often seek a return to mimetic representation in order to shift the emphasis from the world of ab straction to the concrete here-and-now. Because vision is the sense that best lends itself to symbolization, contemporary forays in West ern scholarship into a tactile epistemology are generally rooted in critiques of the current state of visuality in postindustrial, capitalist society. Noting that the senses are formed in a social context, Marx argued that the modern individual's "alienation" is an alienation not only from the products of his or her labor but from the very body and the senses ([1844] 1978, 87-89). This observation informed many subsequent critiques of the apparent atrophy of sensuous knowl edge in industrial and postindustrial societies. British critics such as William Morris critiqued the fact that capitalist culture alien ated the "close" senses such as touch and smell, while honing the visual sense until it acquired the character of a weapon (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 87). Similarly, the Frankfurt School crit ics perceived an increasing process of abstraction stemming from the subjugation of nature in Enlightenment science and culminating in late capitalism. They do not confine this movement to the West, noting that in both Homer and the Rig-Veda the separation of sub ject and object in repres entation originates in per iods of territorial
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domination and the subjection of vanquished peoples (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 13). Still, they argue that capitalism enables the g domi natio n of nature and others to an unp rece dent ed degree. SenE suous knowledges that rely on both body and mind, according to g Horkheimer and Adorno, or wha t Benjamin called the mimetic fac"o ulty, have atrophied in the historical context of industrialism and 3 capitalism. The Frankfurt School critics valued sensuous knowledge © as a reservoir of nonalienated experience (Horkheimer and Adorno H 1972, 71 and passim). Mimesis, they argued, is a form of yielding to one's environment, rather than dominating it, and thus offers a radi cal alternative to the controlling distance from the environment so well served by vision. Recall Benjamin's enormously productive suggestion (1968c) that aura entails a relationship of contact, or a tactile relationship. The "Artwork" essay implies that aura is the material trace of a prior con tact, be it brushworks that attest to the han d of the artist or the patina on a bronze that testifies to centuries of oxidation. Aura enjoins a temporal immediacy, a co-presence, between viewer and object. To be in the presence of an auratic object is more like being in physi cal contact than like facing a representation. In early drafts of the "Artwork" essay Benjamin posited a form of "sensuous similarity" that would find communicative correspondences between nature and perception (Hansen 1987). Sensuous similarity describes corre spondences between one's body and the world that precede repre sentation, such as the relationship between people and the heavens described by astrology (this controversial notion disappeared from the final draft of the essay). Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Fac ulty" (1978a) also took up this theme. This essay and the unfin ished Passagen-Werk, like the early drafts of the "Artwork" essay, attempted, always evasively, to demonstrate a mimetic understand ing of material reality. Benjamin valued children's ability to relate to things mimetically (Buck-Morss 1989, 263-67), and he suspected that the mimetic relationship need not be superseded by an "adult" way of relating to things as merely objects. He also suggested that the use of the mimetic faculty varied over history. "It must be borne in mind that neither mimetic powers nor mimetic objects have re mained the same in the course of thousands of years. Rather, we must suppose that the gift of producing similarities—for example, in dances, whose oldest function this was—and also the gift of rec-
ognizing them, have changed with historical development" (1978a, 141 333). As I will discuss below, like Benjamin (and influencing him), art historians in the early twentieth century assigned a new value to ^ a mimetic kind of vision that drew close to its object. ® Writings on mimesis have a prescriptive implication: throug h mi- © mesis we can not only understan d our world, but create a transo formed relationship to it—or restore a forgotten relationship. Mime - 0 sis shifts the hierarchical relationship between subject and object, g indeed dissolves the dichotomy bet ween the two, such that erst- o while subjects take on the physical, material qualities of objects, while objects take on the perceptive and knowledgeable qualities of subjects.5 Mimesis is an immanent way of being in the world, whereby the subject comes into being not through abstraction from the world but compassionate involvement in it. As Roger Caillois (1984) wrote, mimicry (he did not use the term mimesis) is "an in cantation fixed at its culminating point," because things have been in contact leave their traces irrevocably on each other. 6 Not all accounts of mimesis or of tactile epistemology call for a re turn to a state before language and before representation. They do, however, insist that symbolic representation is not the sole source of meaning. In fact, even in its most abstract forms, symbolic rep resentation derives from a more fundamental, mimetic relationship to the world. Mimetic and symbolic representation are related in the way that the inside of a glove is related to the outside. Benjamin (1978a) argued that language is the highest form of the mimetic fac ulty. This does not describe language as the system of signs we have come to understand it to be. Rather it describes a language that draws close enough to its object to make the sign ignite. "The coher ence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears. For its production by man—like its perception by him—is in many cases, and particularly the most important, lim ited to flashes. It flits past" (1978a, 335). Merleau-Ponty described the same flash of embodied meaning in language when he wrote, "Words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upo n being" (1973, 20). Language is rooted in the body, its meanings inseparable from the sounds and gestures that bore it forth. Simi larly, Derrida emphasized the sensual basis of philosophy in Glas (1974, 161), where he describes the tactile production of speech:
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shaped by the mu cous membran es of the mou th, stuck together by saliva, and spat out. These accounts of symbolic production show g that its embo died and mimetic moment s, where the body of the iS speaker opens into the text and the space between speaker and lis£ tener thickens, are fundamental to its meaning. Even in the most *o sophisticated representational systems, such as writing or cinema, £ the iconic and symbolic coexist with the indexical: representation © is inextricable from embo diment. H I mention ed in chapter 1 that Bergson's Matter and Memory in augurated a way to understand memory as being located in the body. Nevertheless, Bergson undervalued embodied memory, in part because he assumed that memory can be easily brought forth when necessary, not acknowledging the individual and social pro hibitions on the actualization of memory. More fundamentally, he undervalued it because he privileged the intellectual intervention in the bodily actualization of memory. He distinguished two kinds of memory: memory images, and modifications of the body: "the one imagines and the other repeats" ([1911] 1988, 93). The former are ultimately action, since memory can only be brought to conscious ness in action. The latter are mere habitual representation" (89-91). Lumping together the memory of children, dreamers, and "African savages," he notes that all have greater access to spontaneous mem ory, or memory that is immediately and unselectively actualized in the body: he refers to a missionary's account that after preaching a long sermon to some Africans he heard one of them repeat the whole sermon, "with the same gestures, from beginning to end" (199). Berg son dismisses such "impulsive" bodily memory as inferior to a more selective memory that actualizes only what is useful. In arguing for the value of mimetic knowledge I am giving greater value to what Bergson called "habit," whi ch I will argue is a knowledge of the body more highly cultivated than he acknowledges. Clearly Benjamin, in his admiration of children's mimetic capacities, was already begin ning to shift the value of Bergson's hierarchy. Benjamin might have added that the mimetic faculty not only varies historically bu t is cultivated differently across cultures. When the European colonists and traders dismissed African practices as fetishism (Pietz 1987), as I discussed in the last chapter, they were simply unable to recognize the mimetic knowledge that the Africans had assiduously cultivated. Anthropologist Michael Taussig (1993)
closely following the Frankfurt School theory of mimesis, suggests that some cultures retain the mimetic faculty that has been devalued in the West. Taussig historicizes the notio n of mimesis as a form of knowledge by analyzing a number of non-Western cultures' forms of knowledge, primarily those of the Cun a Indians of San Bias Islands and environs. These cultures reveal that knowledge is far more de pendent on bodily mimesis than conventional Western science can acknowledge. Taussig posits an epistemology of touch that would be less instrumental than the predom inan t visual epistemology. Sensuous knowledge implies "a yielding and mirroring of the knower in the unkn own, of thought in its object" (45). Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), following Freud, had compared the yielding form of knowl edge that is mimesis to the death instinct, the willingness to merge back with nature. In contrast, Taussig usefully aligns mimesis not with a state of nature but with an alternative, cultivated episte mology. Similarly inspired by the Frankfurt School theorists, especially Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss (1992) also posits mimesis as an alter native way of being in the world, a sort of productive embrace. She is more cautious than Taussig about the capacities of mimesis. In her reading of Benjamin's (1968a) essay on Baudelaire, Buck-Morss notes that mimesis has become a way to shelter the individual from the shock of the world, such that mimesis is the form of alienation inscribed upon the body in modern culture. Echoing Benjamin's cri tique of remembrance, Buck-Morss notes that in modern, capitalist times perception shields the body from experience, rather than per mitting sense exp erience to flow into the body. Factory workers who learn to coordinate their movements to those of the machines are practicing this murderous form of mimesis (1992, 17), what Hork heimer and Adorno called a "mimesis unto death" (1972, 57). Never theless, Buck-Morss hopes that a rediscovery of mimesis might inform a nonalienated consciousness. Like Taussig, though less opti mistically, she posits a mimetic faculty that might counter the selfdistanciation typical of modernity and restore the body to its senses. One might argue that Taussig's cross-cultural comparison and Buck-Morss's call for a return to a more sensuous time, like Benja min's admiration of children and Horkheimer and Adorno's nostal gia for a time before capitalism when the senses were not alienated, hint of a sort of prelapsarian longing (see Jay 1993b). However, I
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believe that these theorists are borrowing from other cultures and ages in order to "think at the edge of what can be thought," to create a ne w language for a mimetic knowledge that exists in a nascent and latent form in the contemporary West. It is possible to take up theories of tactile epistemology without adopting the dire diagnoses of complete cultural alienation on whi ch these scholars' arguments rest. Sensuous forms of knowledge do not get wip ed out as though by a plague. As Merleau-Ponty ([1969] 1973) argues, we hu ma ns have never ceased to cultivate mimetic knowledges. The issue is that these are not necessarily valued in a given culture. Yet cultures are diverse enough, and "development" is "uneven" enough, that differ ent forms of sensory knowledge always exist in some form. Indeed the current Western cultural longing to rediscover sensuous knowl edges, evident among scholars, artists, and consumers, is a sign of such life. These descriptions of tactile epistemology compellingly formulate the desire for a sensuously informed knowledge that is newly prevalent in the late-twentieth- century West. I would argue, then, that rather than give in to the prelapsarian or primitivist longing for sensuous knowledge that motivates many accounts of mimesis, we acknowledge that many cultures have cul tivated mimesis and other forms of sensuous knowledge. The per ceived need for a mimetic visuality among the critics I have cited came as a reaction to several centuries of European ocularcentrism, in which vision alone was the ontological sense par excellence (Jay 1993a). Yet cultural traditions that do not separate vision so radically from the body have less need to deconstruct and reimagine visu ality. Many of the works I discuss in this book draw on such cultural traditions and critically compare th em to the predominan t Western visual regime. Theorists who call for a return to the senses often treat sense ex per ien ce as prediscursive and, hence, as natural. This is a position I dispute. Theorists descended from Marxism and phenomenology appeal to the senses' basically biological function in serving needs for shelter, nourishment, safety, and sociability. Yet they tend not to acknowledge that sensuous knowledge is cultivated. This, I believe, is a result of the Eurocentric mistake of thinking that because the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell are not accorded much importance in Western cultures, they are outside culture in gen eral. For example, Buck-Morss argues that the senses "maintain an
uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance to cultural 145 domestication" (1992, 6). Similarly, Stev en Shav iro att ribut es a r a w ^ state to sensation: "I am violently, viscerally affected b y this image and this sound, without being able to have recourse to any frame of ° reference, and form of transcendental reflection, or any Symbolic o order" (1993, 32). What Merleau-Ponty called "indirect language" g would supposedly bring listeners into contact with "brute and wild 0 »-b
being," in that it requir es a mimetic relationship between th e body and the word 7 : the same can be said for cinema, which wou ld bring viewers into a mimetic relationship with the image. But just how "wild" is this being? I argue that, while mu ch of sensory experience is presymbolic, it is still cultivated, that is, learned, at the level of the body. The senses are educated to a larger extent th an these theo rists acknowledge. Thus my interest in focusing on sense experience (particularly in cinema) is to find culture within the body, more th an to identify a "wild" strain outside culture. By paying attention to bodily and sen suous experience, we will find that it is to a large degree informed by culture. Perception is already informed by culture, and so even illegible images are (cultural) perception s, not raw sensations. Once these primitivist understandings of the senses are put to rest, then we can explore what part of sensory knowledge is precultural, and thus what part of cinematic perceptio n, if any, is universal in its vis ceral immediacy. Embodied Perception and Embodied Spectatorship
Film is grasped not solely by an intellectual act but by the complex percep tion of the body as a whole. This view of perception implies an attitude toward the object, in this case a film, not as something that must be analyzed and deciphered in order to deliver forth its meaning but as something that means in itself. In the following, I offer a theory of embodied visuality that revalues our mimetic re lationship with the world. Often informed by a newly revived phenomenology, theories of embodiment begin with the premise that our bodies are not passive objects "inscribed" with meaning but are sources of meaning them selves (Csordas 1994, 7). This is not to deny the power of semiotics to analyze cinema, nor the existence of cinematic codes. 8 Yet most
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semiotic approaches cannot take into account the embodied nature of the cinematic viewing experience. 9 A discussion of embodied vision might begin with the early nine teenth-cen tury European physiologists' and philosophers' experiments on the subjective nature of percep tion (Crary 1990). They found vision to be a physiological effect—the impression of color could be produce d by electrical stimulation of the optic nerve, for example—rather than evidence of a coherent, external world of objects. Goethe, Purkinje, and others recounted their experiences of retinal afterimages and other "subjective" images with a mixture of dismay and exhilaration (Crary 1990, chapter 3). Their discoveries of the degree to which vision is embodied dealt a final blow to the "Cartesian" ideal of a detached, objective observer. The nineteenth-century experiments in perception inspired Bergson's theories of how the body mediates perception and memory. His Matter and Memory supports an understanding of how memory may be served by different configurations of the senses, as in differ ent cultures. In Bergson's model, perception is not only inherently social, but also radically embodied, plastic, and instrumental, vari able according to culture and local need. Memory, Bergson wrote, is actualized in bodily sensations ([1911] 1988,130), and correspond ingly is not simply a mental but an embodied process: perception appeals to the "intelligence of the body" (112). To recapitulate, for Bergson an image is not visual but multisensory, comprising all the information that one's senses perceive about an object. The differ ence between an objective reality and the perceived image is that the former is present in all its qualities while the latter isolates only that in which one is interested. When I perceive an object I do not perceive it as a whole but discern it with my different senses, cre ating for myself an image whose gaps "measure . . . the gaps in my needs" (49). Thus the definition of image is that which is isolated from its context by one's (interested) perception, which is informed by memory and actualized in the body. The interestedness of per ception depends upon the memory of what counts as useful infor mation: for example, what counts as useful in a given culture will inform whether one perceives an object visually, tactilely, olfactorily, or (usually) in some combination of these and other modalities. Bergson privileged the distance senses as better able to engage with memory. He distinguished sensation from perception in that
sensation involves direct action up on the body by a stimulus, whereas perception is a measure of potential action. "The more im mediate the reaction is compelled to be, the more must perception resemble a mere contact" ([1911] 1988, 32; my emphasis). Some perceptions are more immediate: smell, taste, and touch usually fall into this category. Other perceptions provide more roo m to maneuver, a "zone of indetermination ,, (32) in which memory may intervene. Only on the body's surface do sensation and per ceptio n coincide: perception is like contact to the degree that reaction is immediate. However, these distinctions are quantitative, not qualita tive. All sense perceptions allow for, and ind eed require, the media tion of memory. Consequently, even the "mere contact" sensations engage with embodied memory. Memory teaches us to ignore an odor that constantly pervades our environment, for example. Cul ture teaches us whi ch odors are to be avoided (for example, research on infants, as well as parents' observations, shows that they do not initially find the smell of feces unpleasant but must learn that it is: this is something that differentiates humans from other species [Engen 1991, 44]). It would seem that vision is the least immediate sense (since it does not involve contact with the body) and thus most apt to extend into memory. However, as the oeuvre of Proust, who read Matter and Memory, demonstr ates, any sense perception can call up seemingly infinite, widening circles of memory like concen tric ripples on a pond. As I noted in chapter 1, a Bergsonian form of film spectatorship in volves a viewer's "attentive recognition" of the images onscreen. Per ception takes place not simply in a phenomenological present but in an engagement with individual and cultural memory. Attentive rec ognition, I suggested, is thus a participatory notion of spectatorship. We move between seeing the object, recalling virtual images that it brings to mind, and comparing the virtual object thus created with the one before us. This viewing process reactivates a viewer's com plex of memory-images at the same time that it creates the object for perception. Therefore it is consistent with the theory that th e image is multisensory, since Bergson's model of perception, upon which Deleuze relies, engages all sense perceptions. When Deleuze writes, toward the end of Cinema 2, that cinema cannot give us a body, but it can give us "the genesis of an 'unknown body,' which we have in the back of our heads, like the unthought in thought" (1989, 201),
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he suggests that cinema may indeed be capable of bringing us to our senses. Given the nature of memory, the audiovisual image necg essarily evokes other sense memories, per hap s even memories that E belong to that "unknown body." For example, when I am watching rg a scene shot in a garden in Shani Mootoo's Her Sweetness Lingers *o (1994), close-ups of magnolia flowers remind me of how they feel 3 and how they smell, and the buzzing of insects rem inds me of the o heat of summer. For me the tape calls up associations with gardens I H have known in my ancestral Alabama, associations that are probably somewhat different from the artist's and other viewers' associations with them. Memory is a process at once cerebral and emotional, and this is especially evident with smell. Research suggests that we cannot re member an odor unless that odor is waved in front of our noses again (Engen 1991, 80). I would love to be able to dispute this, because it seems that I can remember just what a magnolia smells like, though this may be only the stirring of my other sense memories and asso ciations around an empty center of magnolia fragrance. In any case, an audiovisual image evokes bodily associations, so that when I hear crickets and see a magnolia I remember the prickle of sweat on my skin, and (nanoseconds later) the words for the smell of a magnolia— pungent, sap-like, always about to rot (!)—emerge from the emo tional associations I formed with magnolias when I did smell them. Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1992) significantly developed the ground laid by Bergson, loosening up the relationship between perception, body, and memory that was still rather stiff in the work of his prede cessor. In Merleau-Ponty's account, time and space are thick, almost viscous, with experience. "Memory is built out of the progressive and continuous passing of one instant into another, and the inter locking of each one, with its whole horizon, into the thickness of its successor." Our perceptions fold us into this thick world at the same time that they demarcate us from it ([1945] 1992, 215). For MerleauPonty, our relationship to the world is fundamentally mimetic. If cinema is perceived by a who le body, vision is inextricable from the other senses. As Merleau-Ponty argued, vision, by virtue of being a distance sense, allows us to "flatter ourselves that we constitute the world"; whereas tactile experience "adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object. It is not I who touch, it is my body" ([1945] 1992, 316; my
emphasis). Yet, echoing Bergson, he goes on to argue that touch is 149 only "effective," that is, is only a perception, insofar as it links with memory (317). Luce Irigaray criticizes Merleau-Ponty for privileg^ ing vision as the model of all other perceptions (Grosz 1994,104-6; ® Vasseleu 1998). She argues that touch, as the first sense experienced a> by the fetus and by the infant, should be the model of a mutually o implicating relationship of self and world. Certainly, touch seems to 0 be the foundation upon which subsequent sensuous experience is g3 built (Montagu 1971, 270). More than any other sensory deprivation, n the loss of the sense of touch creates a feeling of being an orphan in the world. Irigaray's question, "How to preserve the memory of the caress?," rests on a fundamental sense of loss: of a world of tactility experienced by the fetus and the infant, before language and vision organize its sensorium. Despite Irigaray's critique, I find that Merleau-Ponty shares her ethical insistence on defining a relationship between self and world that is symbiotic, indeed mimetic. They both emphasize that in em bodied per ception the perceiver relinquishes power over the per ceived. The proximal senses are more capable of such a mimetic relationship than vision is, for while looking tends to be unidirec tional, one cannot touch without being touched. Yet vision too, in sofar as it is embodied, is able to relinquish some of the power of the perceiver. As Merleau-Ponty insisted that language is not a substitute for but an extension of being, so Vivian Sobchack (1992) argues that the cinema is not an illusion but an extension of the viewer's em bodied existence. In theories of embodied spectatorship, such as Sobchack's, the relationship between spectator and film is fun damentally mimetic, in that meaning is not solely communicated through signs but experienced in the body. The phenomenological model of subjectivity posits a mutual permeability and mutual cre ation of self and other. Cinema spectatorship is a special example of this enfolding of self and world, an intensified instance of the way our perceptions open us onto the world. Sobchack's phen omenology of cinematic experience stresses the interactive character of film viewing. If one understands film viewing as an exchange between two bodies—that of the viewer and that of the film—then the charac terization of the film viewer as passive, vicarious, or projective must be replaced with a model of a viewer who participates in the produc-
tion of the cinematic experience. Rather than witnessing cinema as thr ough a frame, window, or mirror, the viewer shares and performs cinematic space dialogically (10-15). This work is an important com plement to Deleuze's theory, drawing upon Bergson, of the tem poral relationship between viewer and film: Sobchack, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, emphasizes the spatial relationship between them. I must mention the apparent incongruity between Deleuze's cin ema theory and phenomenology. Deleuze found phenomenology particularly inad equate to the understanding of the cinema, noting Merleau-Ponty's objection that the cinema creates a world that ex ceeds natural perception, while phenomenology is modeled upon a notion of natura l per ception (1986,57). In addition, Deleuze doubted the usefulness of phenomenology to understand perception, argu ing, to state it simply, that phenomenology privileges consciousness over the world ("a beam of light whi ch drew things out of their native darkness"), whereas for Bergson (and Deleuze) consciousness and the world, that is, the image, are indistinguishable (1986,60-61). Yet, as I have argued, Merleau-Ponty's p henomenology did in fact inherit and expand Bergson's implication of perception in the body. More centrally, it seems that phenomenology builds a bridge to explaining how a viewer experiences images. Deleuzian cinematic philosophy is not a theory of spectatorship. To talk about the states, histories, and circumstances of the individual people experiencing cinema, we need a phenomenology of individual experience. Deleuze says "Give me a body, then," but his interest is not in exploring how cinema relates to the bodies we have already been given. And although they cannot be utterly reconciled, both MerleauPonty's "consciousness of the world" and Bergson's "the world is consciousness" work against the psychoanalytic understanding that "consciousness misrecognizes the world." Theories of em bodied spectatorship counter at their root theories of representation grounded in the alienation of visuality from the body, in particu lar Lacan's theory of the mirror phase, which has been so influen tial in cinema studies. The mirror-phase theory of subjectivity is based upon a fundamentally alienated selfhood th at is constructed visually, when the infant comes into awareness of being seen from the outside. 10 In contrast, Merleau-Ponty posits a primordial subjec tivity, an immanent knowledge of the body, that "fleshes out" specu lar alienation. Rather than an encounter between two lacks (the
fundamentally lacking subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the 151 fundamentally lacking object of the film), the phenomenological en counter is an exchange between an embodied self-in-becoming (the ^ viewer) and its embodied intercessor (the cinema). Theories of em- ® bodied visuality acknowledge the presence of th e body in the act of CD seeing, at the same time that they relinquish the (illusory) unity of o the self. In embodied spectatorship the senses and the intellect are 0 not separate. Sobchack writes, "The lived-body does not have senses H [which require a prior separation and codification of experience]. o It is, rather, sensible" [77). Even pornography, a form of cinema in which the image is generally thought to be utterly objectified, can be the site of embodied and intersubjective spectatorship, as Linda Williams (1995) has demonstrated. Another recent theory of embodied spectatorship, Steven Shaviro's (1993), is less rigorous and more polemical than Sobchack's. He argues that film does not (or not only) provide pleasure by ap peasing the spectator's ego, fixing him or her in a position of domi nance, but also through "decentered freeplay, the freedom from the constraints of subjectivity, that editing and special effects make pos sible" (42). Yet given that he draws his examples from Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990) and the famous eye-slicing image from Un chien andalou (Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali, 1928), Shaviro's violent formulation of the tactile image would be more accurately called propulsive or projectile.11 Shaviro's assaultive and masochis tic model of spectatorship maintains a radical alterity between self and film, merely switching the poles of who does what to whom. Unlike Shaviro, I would suggest that "the [Deleuzian] gap is a wound at the heart of vision" (50) only if we equate vision with mas tery. We need not respond with dread to cinema's threat/promise to dissipate, or even to wrench away, our unified subjectivity. A tactile visuality may be shattering, but it is not necessarily so. In the following I explore how cinema may reconfigure, rather than shatter, a subjectivity that may not be cast in stone in the first place. Tactile visuality draws upon the mimetic knowledge that does not posit a gulf between subject and object, or the spectator and the world of a film. The theory of haptic visuality I advance should allow us to reconsider how the relationship between self and other may be yielding-knowing, more than (but as well as) shattering. In intercultural cinema, haptic images are often used in an explicit critique
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of visual mastery, in the search for ways to bring the image closer to the body and the other senses. g Let me repeat that I am exploring sense experience in cinema not j£ to seek a primordial state of sensory innocen ce, but to find culture £ within the body. A valid critique of phenomenology is that it mis*o takenly believes that all of experience is accessible to consciousness; 2 it is just a matter of being in the present and perceiving. Merleau
ordinary histories become encoded in the body. When intercultural films and videos appeal to the different power relations involved in looking and in touching, they rem ind us that these power relations are built into cultural organizations of perception. As I will argue at greater length in the next chapter, embodied responses to cinema vary not only individually but collectively. The cinematic encounter takes place not only between my body
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and the film's body, but my sensorium and the film's sensorium. We bring our own personal and cultural organization of the senses to
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cinema, and cinema brings a particular organization of the senses to us, the filmmaker's own sensorium refracted through the cine matic apparatus. One could say that intercultural spectatorship is the meeting of two different sensoria, which may or may not inter sect. Spectatorship is thus an act of sensory translation of cultural knowledge. For example, when a work is viewed in a cultural con text different from that in which it was produ ced, viewers may miss some multisensory images: many viewers will miss the implications of references to cooking, dance, and hairstyle in Julie Dash's Daugh ters of the Dust (1992) that are more likely to be clear to an African diasporan viewer. Paul Stoller writes optimistically that "a more sen sual gaze will not enable us to see wha t the ethnographic other sees, but it will produce texts that correspond more closely to the experi ence and perception of the ethnographic other" (Stoller 1989, 68). Similarly, a more embodied perception of intercultural cinema may not make those sensory experiences available to the viewer, but it will at least give us a sense of what we are missing. And then again, viewers in the intercultural encounter may discover sense informa tion that was not obvious in the original context. The Memory of Touching
A number of intercultural works engage sense memories, and memories of touch in particular, by exploiting the relative weakness of the visual image—the lack of things to see. In chapter 11 discussed several works that "mind the gaps" in grainy, faded stock footage or consumer-format video to search for unrepresentable memories: films such as Handsworth Songs, Bontoc Eulogy, and Calendar. See ing Is Believing, as we "saw" earlier, finds a way to touc h the image when seeing is not enough. Mona Hatoum's videotape Measures of
Distance (1988) breaks down the visual relationship in order to ap
peal to a personal an d cultural memory of touch. Measures of Distance begins with still images so close as to be unrecognizable, overlaid with a tracery of Arabic text. Warm reds and purples and curving shapes suggest that it is a close-up of parts of a body, but the large grain of the images and the (to non-Arabic readers) decorative letters effectively break down any figure-ground relationship. As the tape continues, the images are shown from a greater distance and revealed to be a naked woman whose large, volup tuous body is still veiled in the image's graininess and the layer of text. Meanwhile, Hatoum's mother's letters, translated and read in voice-over, convey her deep love and longing for "my dear Mona, the apple of my eye" and let us infer that she and her husband, originally Palestinian, are living in Lebanon during the civil war, while their children are dispersed all over the world. Undated but probably written in the mid-1980s, the letters testify to the increas ing difficulty of communication—no phone, and later no post—as the shelling of southern Lebanon worsens. At the same time, the letters make us realize that these images are photographs that her daughter took of her on her last visit; further, they tell that Hatoum's father was very jealous of his wife's body and the idea of another, even/especially his daughter, being in intimate proximity to it. Images of the most intimate places in the home; the figure of a naked woman, nearly obliterated by marks on the surface of the image; a daughter's desperate desire to make contact with her par ents, as war makes communication ever riskier: these elements are eerily prefigured in an earlier video work by Hatoum, Changing Parts (1985). There, quiet shots of the clean interior of the bath room of her parents' house in Beirut are intercut with a perfor man ce by the artist in London. Hatoum, naked, is imprisoned inside a polyethylene-walled container, whose sloping sides and floor pre vent her from standing up. The bottom of the container appears to be covered with mud. As Hatoum struggles to rise, her limbs mar k the sides of the container until they—and thus the surface of the image, since the container parallels the camera screen—become a pal impsest of muddy traces. At times she scratches on the plastic walls in a kind of incoherent writing. As this performance becomes increasingly frenzied, the tape cuts to the calm of home, represented in the humb lest things: a tooth brush balanced by the sink, the clean white tiles, the pipes along the bathroom wall. On the sound track,
52. Still from Measures of Distance. Courtesy of Video Out.
53. Still from Changing Parts. Courtesy of Video Out.
a Mozart concerto gradually gives way to a radio broadcast from Beirut. The words of the broadcast are barely intelligible, but the BBC-accented reporter appears to be describing another bombing of the city where her parents live. In both these works by Hatoum, the ill-fated desire to make contact with home is expressed in tactile markings on the surface of the image, which obscure the image of a woman's naked body. Here the haptic image is suffused with sad ness and desperation, the inadequacy of one kind of touch substi tuting for another. (Hatoum also seems to have a sustained interest
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in plumbing: the bathroom pipes documen ted in Changing Parts, other kinds of pipes in Corps Stranger, which I discuss later.) Like these works by Hatoum, Sami Al-Kassim's film Far From You (1996) uses the disintegration of the image to meditate on the painful knowledge of the exile: a knowledge that is ever more rarefied, ever further from the beloved things of home. The mother imaged in Alkassim's Far From You is not her own bu t a national mother figure, the singer Umm Kholtoum. Kholtoum was beloved throughout Arab countries and the Arab diaspora, her dignified image and powerful voice signifying a pan-Arab nationalism for her generation. Yet, as Al-kassim points out in voice-over, Kholtoum as a representation of the Arab nation is deeply ironic, as her powerful voice is a reminder of the 1967 defeat of Egypt by Israel, her association with Nasser, and the blame she received for "numbing the masses." Although her powerful singing remains intact on the sound track, her image is re duced almost to an abstract pattern by the tenth-generation images on a TV screen. Together they call up bittersweet and conflicting memories: the longing of exiled Egyptians for a past life that she represents, yet the political turmoil she also represents. At first, Alkassim's processing of the film suggests a television's poor reception of a foreign broadcast, or the bootleg videos so treasured by emi grants. Later, the multigenerational, color-processed image renders the images of Kholtoum grotesque, pink and purple blobs barely indicating the singer's strong-featured face and regal movements. These distorted images call to mind Hamid Naficy's (1993) warning that exiles will ruin their chances at creating a new life in diaspora if they fetishize the signifiers of their homeland. At the same time, the decaying image makes the viewer reflect on how much of percep tion is generated by memory and longing, rather than engagement with a crisply available visual object. Another provocative example of how cinema can express em bodied knowledge is the short video I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Inside (1992) by Roula Haj-Ismail. A philosophy student in Lebanon, Haj-Ismail made this tape in a workshop taught in Beirut by Walid Ra'ad. It attempts to give form to the "inner scars" of both the artist and the artist's grandmother, a Palestinian from Haifa, by exploring the visible scars on people and buildings. "Death cannot be made visible or cast the shadow of its presence," Haj-Ismail says, as the camera slowly
54- Frame enlargement from Far From You
pans images of suffering bodies: Gustav Klimt's emaciated women, a Gilles Peress photo of a child with its face covered with flies. Such images cannot give a sense of the living with wounds that is her and her neighbors' experience: this is an experience that can only be touched. Shots of bomb-pocked walls are common in films and videos about Lebanon, but Haj-IsmaiPs camera treats them like bodies, caressing the buildings, searching the corners of shutters and stone-latticed windows like folds of skin. Shot thus, these ex terior scars increasingly resemble the image with which they are paired, a close-up of a woman's fingers, with red-enameled nails, repeatedly pressing into her cesarean scar. "Everything around me is imperfect, broken, shattered, destroyed. Holy wars, broken win dows, jagged edges. My world and I, we echo each other. We reflect upon each other: two broken pieces of another broken part." As her scars are compared to the scarred buildings, so other shots pair the woman's shifting eyes with the wind ows facing so close to her house. "We are forced to enter into the lives of others," Haj-Ismail says with rising frustration. "We hear them fighting, singing, showering; I see them cooking, eating, and cleaning. One is never alone, I am never alone." The devastation of Beirut, the brokenness and incom pleteness of each person, family, and house, has forced a greater porousness among them . To make scars speak, Haj-Ismail suggests, requires acknowledging one's lack of wholeness. Haj-Ismail elicits individual and communal memories by appealing to the way those memories are embodied.
55 and 56. Stills from I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Inside
What Haj-Ismail evokes in condensed, poetic form is evident in narrative form in a video by Yasmine Khlat, Leylouna notre nuit (1987), a documentary of the everyday lives of women in a Beirut apartment building during the worst years of the Israeli bombings of Lebanon. Here too we witness the porosity of a neighborhood where women's lives mingle, where the world comes in through the many open windows. Even when the windows are closed one can hear the bombs exploding. The television too is like another win dow connecting the women's lives with other Lebanese. It brings news of more deaths, which registers on their bodies, as they weep, as well as in their talk. The difference between the narrative Ley-
louna notre nuit and the experimental I Wet My Hands . . . is one of
degree. The former gives a sense of the what the women of Beirut suffered (in the senses both of undergoing pain and of having ex perience) during the years of the Israeli shelling through narrative, more than through appeals to sensory experience. The latter evokes this suffering by embodying it in the image, more than through nar rative. I Wet My Hands . . . and other works appeal to embodied memory by bringing vision as close as possible to the image; by con verting vision to touch. They also work by bringing vision close to the body and into contact with other sense perceptions; by making vision multisensory. They do this in part by refusing to make their images accessible to vision, so that the viewer must resort to other senses, such as touch, in order to perceive the image. A Note on Sensory Difference
The reader will notice that many of the haptic films and videos I dis cuss in this chapter are made by Arab and Arab-diaspora women. Though this is a topic I will take up at length in the next chapter, it is worth considering whether these artists have a specific cul tural interest in tactile or embodied knowledge. We might consider that, in the sensuous geographies of Arab and North African cul tures in particular, touch and smell play relatively important roles. Whereas in most other cultures touch and smell are considered pri vate senses, in Arab societies they are means of public communica tion (Rodaway 1994, 79). It is commonly noted that touch is a social sense in Arab cultures: for example, that men embrace and walk arm-in-arm in public. Since touching other people is considered a private activity in other cu ltu res, especially northern ones, th is is often interpreted as public intimacy and affection; but it is better understood as a carefully negotiated system of establishing trust (Hall 1969; Griffin 1990,110; Rodaway 1994, 56-59). Also, fragrance has a long-standing importance in Arab countries, even given recent incursions of olfactory consumer culture such as the use of brandnam e perfumes. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for the social importance of smell, such as the striking fact that Chinese mu sk was incorporated in the mortar of the mosques of Kara Amed and Tabriz built in Persia in the twelfth century (Stoddart 1990,155). In the con temporary United Arab Emirates, one of the most traditional and
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wealthy Arab societies, elaborate use is made of perfumes for social occasions, including the offering of perfumes to guests at the end of g a meal (Classen, Howes, and Synnot 1994,125-29). Compared to the E£ ur ban geography of European or Chinese cities, for example, a less jg visual and more tactile and olfactory relationship to space informs e o the den se, cellular geography of Arab cities, organized around pub£ lie/private spaces rather than vistas (Rodaway 1994, 59). In / Wet My 0 Hands, the densely interconnected city is an extension of the body. H In Far From You, Measures of Distance, and other works, the tactile image does seem to reflect a greater cultur al awareness of knowledge gained through touch, to the point of substituting touch for vision. Nevertheless, I wish to be careful in arguing that art necessarily expresses cultural predispositions, for the connection is not selfevident. As she points out in / Wet My Hands . . . , Haj-Ismail is a Western-educated artist, "always feeling out of place: my hairy body and my world's strategic position; my black hair and its diverse identities, my acne an d its civil war, my accent and its francophone, Anglo-Saxon ties, my name and its religious beliefs." Her tape rep resents a tactile relationship to the world that is traditional in Arab cultures, but she does this in a self-aware, even somewhat ironic way. Most intercultural artists have grown up in Western, or hybrid, cultures. They may not have learned the organization of the senses typical of their traditional cultures. Their explorations ma yb e firmly couched in the Western critique of ocularcentrism, like those of other Western artists: Tran (1997) describes her work as based in a feminist critique of ocularcentrism more than in any traditional Vietnamese sensory practice. They may be perceptual experiments in the tradition of video art, which is how Seoungho Cho identifies his work, rather than in terms of his Korean heritage—although he has written, "In Korea, a person opens his heart through opening his eyes" (1994), suggesting that in his cultural tradition vision can be aligned with respect rather than mastery. Or these explorations may be selective combi nations of a critique of Western visuality and a self-conscious exploration of other cultural traditions. Beharry (1996), for example, says that her interest in touch comes from a strong desire to rediscover and reinvent her Indian heritage, as well as from more personal reasons. Seeing Is Believing attempts to rediscover a traditional Ind ian sensuous knowledge, but critically and self-consciously. When we look to traditional Indian concep-
tions of vision, we do find that vision is considered to be a means of 161 knowledge by analog to hearing and touch more than in its own right (Pinard 1990). The spoken wor d is at the heart of Vedic worship, H embodied by the high-caste Brahman who is the vessel of sacred ® knowledge. Written language and visual representations are deter- © mined by the images contained in the chants (Pinard 1990, 78). As o Stella Kramrisch describes it, the traditional Hindu conception of 0 vision startlingly parallels the tactile visuality imagined by the pr e- g3 Socratic philosophers. In it, vision entails "a going forth of the sight n toward the object. Sight touches it and reveals its form. Touch is the ultimate connection by which the visible yields to being grasped. While the eye touches the object, the vitality that pulses in it is com municated" (Stella Kramrisch, quoted in Pinard 1990, 84). Thus it would seem that the tactile image reflects a traditional Indian orga nization of perception. Of course one must take such accounts with a grain of salt, or a spot of masala, for as descriptions of high-culture, high-caste reli gious practices, they still cannot describe the everyday Indian sensorium. Religious practices find their everyday expression in ritu als around eating and bathing, for example, and it is here that the conceptual universe would seem to be embodied in daily life. The complex relationships between temperature, flavor, and color in Indian tradition (see, for example, Daniel 1987), reflected in Ayurvedic medicine, are also found in cooking, a women's activity who se theory is embodied rather than explicit. Concluding his sketch of the Indian sensorium, Sylvain Pinard avows that in fact taste is the sense modality that structures all others. Eating, he argues, assimi lates all the other modalities: the orality of significant sound, the tactility of vision, the discrimination of touch (1990, 93). These as pects of the Indian sensorium are reflected in Beharry's tap e, but they are incorporated critically, by an artist who is cognizant of the cultural uses of the senses as only the culturally hybrid can be. In short, I believe it is important to show how cinema may respond to different cultural organizations of the senses—for example, by ap pealing to the sense of touch—without insisting th at it always does.
162 Haptic Visuality
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Let us examine how cinema may evoke the sense of touch by appealing to haptic visuality Haptic perception is usually denned by psychologists as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience tou ch both on the surface -j% of and inside our bodies (see, for example, Heller and Schiff 1991). In 03 hapti c visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch. I H derive the term from ninet een th- cen tur y art historian Alois Riegl's distinction between haptic and optical images. Riegl borrowed the term haptic from physiology (from haptein, to fasten), since the term tactile might be taken too literally as "touching" (Iversen 1993, 170). His use of a physiological term indicates that he was aware of the experiments in the subjectivity and physiology of vision that also informed Bergson. Like Bergson, he argued that subjectivity is in volved in perception: percept ion requires "the supplementary inter vention of thought processes" (Riegl 1927, 28; quoted in Iverson, JJ). Haptic visuality is distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in other wor ds, how we usually conceive of vision. Opti cal visuality depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distin guish form so mu ch as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze. 12 1 am changing RiegFs definitions somewhat. He associated the haptic image with a "sharpness that provoked the sense of touch," while the optical image invites the viewer to perceive depth, for example, through the blurring of chiaroscuro ([1902] 1995, 30-31). Most important in Riegl's distinction is the relationship the different kinds of images create with the viewer. Because a haptic composition appeals to tactile connections on the surface plane of the image, it retains an "objective" character; but an optical composition gives up its natur e as physical object in order to invite a distant view that allows the viewer to organize him/herself as an all-perceiving subject (31). To distinguish more terms, a film or video (or painting or photo graph) may offer haptic images, while the term haptic visuality em phasizes the viewer's inclination to perceive them . The works I pro pose to call haptic invite a look that moves on the surface plane of
the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what she or he 163 is be ho ld in g. S u ch ima ge s res olv e in to figuration on ly gra dua lly , if ^ at all. Conversely, a haptic work may create a n i m a g e of such detail, sometimes through miniaturism, that it evades a distanced view, ® instead pulling the viewer in close. Such images offer such a pr o- CD liferation of figures that the viewer perceives the texture as much o as the objects imaged. While optical perception privileges the rep0 •"+5
resentational power of the image, haptic perceptio n privileges the material presence of the image. Drawing from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinesthetics, haptic visuality in volves the body more than is the case with optical visuality. Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body: thinking of cinema as haptic is only a step toward considering the ways cinema appeals to the body as a whole. The difference between haptic and optical visuality is a matter of degree. In most processes of seeing, both are involved, in a dialectical movement from far to near. And obviously we need both kinds of visuality: it is hard to look closely at a lover's skin with optical vision; it is hard to drive a car with haptic vision. Haptic images are actually a subset of what Deleuze referred to as optical images: those images that are so "thin" and uncliched that the viewer must bring his or her resources of memory and imagi nation to complete them. The haptic image forces the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into narrative. Thus it has a place in Deleuze's time-image cinema. Optical visu ality, by contrast, assumes that all the resources the viewer requires are available in the image. Accordingly, the optical image in Riegl's sense corresponds to Deleuze's movement-image, as it affords the illusion of completeness that lends itself to narrative. The haptic image, like other sensuous images, can also be under stood as a particular kind of affection-image that lends itself to the time-image cinema. Recall that the affection-image, while it usually extends into action, may also force a visceral and emot ional contem plation in those any-spaces-whatever divorced from action. Thus the haptic image connects directly to sense perception, while by passing the sensory-motor schema. A sensuous engagement with a tactile or, for example, olfactory image is pu re affection, prior to any extension into movement. Such an image may then be bound into the sensory-motor schema, but it need not be. The affection-image, then, can bring us to the direct experience of time through the body.
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Haptic cinema does not invite identification with a figure—a sen sory-motor reaction—so muc h as it encourages a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image. Consequently, as in the mimetic relationship, it is not proper to speak of the object of a haptic look as to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image. Be cause haptic visuality tends less to isolate and focus upon objects than simply to be co-present with them, it seems to correspond, if only formally, to Trinh T. Minh-ha's example (in Reassemblage, 1982) of "speaking not about, but nearby" the object she is filming. In revaluing haptic visuality I am suggesting that a sensuous re sponse may be elicited without abstraction, through the mimetic relationship between the perceiver and a sensuous object. This re lationship does not require an initial separation between perceiver and object that is mediated by representation. Haptic Visuality and Cultural Difference
Though Riegl was concerned to show the relation between sensory organization and cultural expression (as opposed to a universal ideal of art), he presumed a teleological development in which the hap tic must necessarily give way to the optical, in order to realize the achievements of Renaissance perspective. This teleological view re quired Riegl to ignore optical illusionism in early Roman painting and to otherwise rewrite the history of art. Thus it is all the more interesting to examine the cultural biases that would have caused him to so value the optical over the haptic. Cultural difference in the representation of space was of great interest to Riegl and some of his contemporaries. They needed both to take these differences into account an d to argue that European art was superior to other cultural traditions. RiegPs student Wilhelm Worringer noted that historians wer e having to revise their assump tions when confronted by "cultures of import" (1928, 81; quoted in Lant 1995, 49)—probably the Near Eastern, Asian, African, and Oceanic art that entered European markets in the wake of colonial adventures. Riegl was one of several art historians who were reevaluating the spatial qualities of visual art around the time that the new medium of cinema was impressing its audiences with the apparent physi cal immediacy of the moving image. Riegl and Adolf Hildebrand, in
books each wrote in 1893, were the first art historians to theorize 165 spatiality in art with an eye to cultural variations in the represen tation of space. Soon after, other art historians, including Bernard _j Berenson (1896) and Worringer ([1908] 1948), dr ew attention to the ° tactile quality of vision. In The Florentine Painters of the Renaiso sance (1896), Berenson argued that the quality most essential to o painting was "the power to stimulate the tactile consciousness" (5). 0 t-b
Like Bergson, he was influenced by new research in perceptual psychology, and argued that touch is the first sense an infant ex periences (4). Through retinal impressions, a painting can stimulate perceptions of volume and movement in the imagination, even the body, of the viewer. According to Berenson, in terms that sound like a volumetric version of the mirror stage, tactile values simply make life better. "The stimulation of our tactile imagination awakens our consciousness of the importance of the tactile sense in our physical and mental functioning, and thus, again, by making us feel better provided for by life than we were aware of being, gives us a height ened sense of capacity" (11) .13 These early theorists of tactility in visual art generally considered it to appeal to the viewer's kinesthetic sense, and thus to recreate, through reception, a sense of the three-dimensionality of the de picted object. But in addition Riegl made an important distinction between th e materiality of haptic represen tation and the abstrac tion of optical representation, as wh en he wrote, "With an increased space and three-dimensionality the figure in a work of art is also increasingly dematerialized" ([1927] 1985, 74). This distinction be tween concrete and abstract describes a cultural difference as well. Riegl's history of art tu rn ed on the gradual demise of a physical tac tility in art and the rise of figurative space. He observed this devel opment from the haptic style of ancient Egyptian art, which "maintainted] as far as possible the appearance of a unified, isolated object adhering to a plane," to the optical style of Roman art, in which ob jects relinquished a tactile co nnection to the plane (Iversen 1993, 78-79; quoting Riegl [1927] 1985). His theory dwelt on the moment in late Roman art when figure and ground became thoroughly im bricated (Riegl [1927] 1985). According to Riegl, the rise of abstraction in late-Roman works of art (sculpture, painting, and especially metal works) made it pos sible for a beholder to identify figures not as concrete elements on
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a surface but as figures in space. Optical images arose with the dis tinction of figure from ground, and the abstraction of the ground that made possible illusionistic figuration. Listen, for example, to Riegl's description of the difference between late Roman and Byzantine mosaics. The aerial rear plan e of Roman mosaics remained always a plane, from which individual objects were distinguished by coloring and [relief]. . . . However, the gold ground of the Byzantine mosaic, which generally excludes the background and is a seeming regression [in the progress toward depiction of illusionistic space], is no longer a ground plane but an ideal spatial ground which the people of the west were able subsequently to populate with real objects and to expand toward infi nite depth. ([1927] 1985,13) It is important to note that the creation of abstract space in Byzan tine art made it possible for a beholder to identify figures not as concrete elements on a surface but as figures in space. By contrast, hap tic space is concrete, in that it seeks unity only on a surface. The rise of optical representation marked a general shift toward a cultural ideal of abstraction, with significant consequences. Ab straction facilitated the creation of an illusionistic picture plane that would be necessary for the identification of, and identification with, figures in the sense that we use "identification" now. In other words, optical representation makes possible a greater distance be tween beholder and object which allows the beholder to imagina tively project him/herself into or onto the object. Antonia Lant notes this implication as well when she writes, "Riegl's understanding of the relation of viewer to art work is not derived from his or her iden tification with a represented human figure, but rather operates at the level of design, suggesting an additional avenue for discussing film figuration besides narrative and plot" (1995, 64). The revolution in visual styles Riegl observed coincided with a revolution in religious thought. The Barbarian invasion of the Roman Empire precipitated a clash between the belief that the body could be the vehicle for grace and the belief that spirituality re quired transcending the physical body. 14 Barbarian notions that the spirit transcends the body seem to be reflected in the development of a figurative picture plane that transcends the materiality of the support. Hence the origin of moder n illusionistic representation can be traced to the cu ltural clash between beliefs in transcendent and
immanent spirituality, rep res ented by the late Roman battle of the 167 optical and the hap tic. Both Riegl and Auerbach were tracing the history of a shift in _a the nature of Western figurative representation. According to Auer- ® bach (1953), in the figural tradition (for example, in the Christian © Old Testament), the symbolic characters are figures of transcend eno tal events, existing not on the horizontal plane of earthly history but 0 t-b
on the vertical axis of divine teleology. 15 Both were concerned with how the means of representation become more tran spar ent in order to awaken sensuous response in the viewer/listener. That is, both described how Western art came to achieve sensuous similarity to its object through representation, rather than through contact. Riegl, especially, argued that increasing abstraction, or increasing mem bership in the symbolic, characterizes the history of Western art. As Margaret Iversen (1993, 125-26) points out, Riegl's theory of the relationship between subject and object is based on Hegel's Aesthet ics, in that he argues that the increased di sembodiment of painting, its existence as pure appearance alone, corresponds to a disembod ied subject represented by (optical) vision alone. In his 1902 essay on the Dutch group portrait, Riegl wrote, "The history of mankind up to the present is intelligible in this regard in terms of two simple extremes: in the beginning, the conception that every subject was at the same time an object—that is, only objects exist; today, the oppo site whereby there are hardly any objects and only a single subject" (quoted in Iversen, 125; Iversen's trans.). Obviously my project here contrasts absolutely with Riegl's teleological assumptions. What these historians of Western art and lit erature saw as a necessary development was in fact only typical of a particular (albeit long) period in a particular (claimed as West ern) history of representational practice. They were unable to ac knowledge aspects of Western art that did not fit into their teleol ogy, a teleology that was founded in the first place on assumptions of Western cultural superiority. Riegl's bias, for example, leads him to ignore early signs of the modernist revaluation of tactility, such as the visible brushstrokes in works before 1825 by artists such as Goya, Gericault, and Delacroix. Both Riegl and Auerbach were writing about their respective fields on the cusp of modernism, which could be characterized as the re turn of materiality to the mediums of art and literature. Paint became
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opaque again, wor ds became dense, and meaning came to reside in the embodied and intersubjective relationship between work and viewer or reader. After modernism it is easier to conceive that contact, and not only representation, is the source of sensuous similarity between a subject and an object (or between two subjects). Mean ing occurs in the physical, sensuous contact between two subjects before, and as well as, it occurs in representation. The current intellectual embrace of embodiment, and the increased interest among artists in haptic and sensuous work, rep udi ate Riegl's teleology of disembodied and singular subjectivity (or, if one interprets Riegl more generously, they demonstrate a shift in his proposed dialec tic). These recent changes reflect a revaluation of the non-Western and "minor" Western cultural traditions of material and sensuous art that Riegl saw as inferior. Deleuze and Guattari appropriate Riegl's findings to describe a "nomad art" (appropriate to the idea of the small, portable metalworks of the late Romans and their Barbarian conquerors) whose sense of space is contingent, close-up, short-term, and lacking an immobile outside point of reference (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 493). Riegl described the effects of figure-ground inversion in hal lucinatory detail in Late Roman Art Industry (1927). But where he saw this viral self-replication of the abstract line as the last gasp of a surface-oriented representational system before the rise of illusionistic space, Deleuze and Guattari take the abstract line as a sign of the creative power of nonfigurative representation. "The organism is a diversion of life," they write, whereas the abstract line is life itself (497). Where Riegl justifies the tactile image as a step on the way to modern representation, Deleuze and Guattari see it as an alterna tive representational tradition. I concur with them insofar as haptic representation has continued to be a viable strategy in Western art, although it is usually relegated to minor traditions. Interestingly, Riegl was initially a curator of textiles. One can imagine how the hours spent inches away from the weave of a car pet might have stimulated the art historian's ideas about a close-up and tactile way of looking. His descriptions evoke the play of the eyes over non- or barely figurative textures. The surface of video (generally more than film) is itself like a loosely woven fabric. I have come across a handful of works that use images of fabric to ap peal to memory, to invite a more tactile kind of vision, and to call
up on specific cultural knowledges associated wi th specific fabrics. 169 Shauna Beharry's silk sari should be quite familiar by now. Another memory-fabric is a roll of silk in Leila Sujir's India Hearts Beat ^ (1988), which the artist electronically processes to become an elec- ® tronic tapestry, weaving together three women's stories of ho me0 sickness. And a work in progress by Palestinian-born scholar and o videomaker Alia Arasoughly uses the close-up image of an Oriental 0 t-b
carpet as the ground for an excursion into the memory of exile. It recalls how one might lie on a carpet and stare at its patterns, daydreaming; or, how patients might have gazed at the patterns on the carpets covering Freud's couch. Riegl observed tactile modes of representation in traditions gen erally deemed subordinate to the procession of Western art history: Egyptian and Islamic painting, late Roman metalwork, textile art, and ornament. One can add Western high-art traditions such as medieval illuminated manuscripts, Flemish oil painting from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and the surface-oriented, decora tive rococo arts of eighteenth-century France. I would also include the "low" traditions of weaving, embroidery, decoration, and other domestic and women's arts as a presence of tactile imagery that has long existed at the underside of the great works. All these traditions involve intimate, detailed images that invite a small, caressing gaze. Usually art history has deemed them second ary to grand compositions, important subjects, and a correspond ingly exalted position of the viewer. However, a number of art histo rians have suggested alternative eco nomies of looking that are more appropriate to tactile images, and, not incidentally, more embodied. For example, Svetlana Alpers (1983) and Naomi Schor (1987) de scribe ways of seeing seventeenth-century Dutch still life, in which the eye lingers over innumerable surface effects instead of being pulled into centralized structu res. Mieke Bal (1991) proposes a way to read paintings not around the phallic Barthesian punctum but a gender-neutral navel. Jennifer Fisher (1997) proposes a haptic aes thetics that involves not tactile visuality so much as a tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive awareness of the physicality of the art object. As I am here, Fisher is con cerned to redee m aesthetics from their transcendental implicatio ns by emphasizing the corporeal and immanent nature of the experience of art. Finally, there is some temptation to understand haptic visuality
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as a feminine kind of visuality; to follow, for example, Irigaray's as sertion that "woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking" (1985, 26). Nevertheless, rather th an embrace the notion of tactility as a feminine form of per ception, I prefer to see the haptic as a visual strategy that can be used to describe alternative visual traditions, including women's and feminist practices, rather than a feminine quality in particular. The arguments of historians such as Bal, Buck-Morss, and Schor supplant phallocentric models of vision with a vision that is more ambient and intimate. Yet their arguments do not call up a radically feminine mode of viewing so much as sug gest that these ways of viewing are available and used differently in different per iods. To trace a history of tactile looking offers a strategy that can be called upon when our optical resources fail to see. Haptic Cinema
Whether cinema is perceived as haptic may be an effect of the work itself, or it may be a function of the viewer's predisposition. Any of us with moderately impaired vision can have a haptic viewing ex per ien ce by removing our glasses when we go to the movies. More seriously, a viewer may be disposed to see haptically because of individual or cultural learning. The works I describe here have in trinsic haptic qualities, to which a viewer may or may not respond. Similarly, there may be historical periods when cinema is perceived more or less optically or haptically. In its early years cinema appealed to the emerging fascination with the instability of vision, to embo died vision and the viewer's physio logical responses (Gunning 1990, Lastra 1997). Like the Roman battle of the haptic and the optical, a battle between the material signifi cance of the object and the representational power of the image was waged in the early days of cinema (at least in the retrospection of historians). The early-cinema phenomenon of a "cinema of attrac tions" (Gunning 1990) describes an embodied response, in which the illusion that permits distanced identification with the action on screen gives way to an immediate bodily response to the screen. Noel Burch (1986) also notes this connection, suggesting that early cinema appeals to the viewer not through the analog representation of deep space but more im-mediately. As the language of cinema becam e standardized, cinema appealed more to narrative identiflca-
tion than to bodily identification. In theories of embodied spectatorship, we are returning to the interest of modern cinema theorists such as Benjamin, Bela Balasz, and Dziga Vertov in the sympathetic relationship between the viewer's body and the cinematic image, bridging the decades in which cinema theory was dominated by theories of linguistic signification. The term haptic cinema has a brief history. The first attribution of
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a haptic quality to cinema appears to be by Noel Burch, who uses it to describe the "stylized, flat rendition of deep space" in early and experimental cinema (1986, 497). Antonia Lant (1995) has simi larly used the term "haptical cinema" to describe early films that exploit the contrast between visual flatness and depth. She notes the preponderance of Egyptian motifs in such films and posits that early filmmakers were, like Riegl, fascinated with Egyptian spatiality Deleuze uses the term to describe the use of the sense of touch, isolated from its narrative functions, to create a cinematic space in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). He writes, "The hand doubles its prehensile function (as object) by a connective function (of space): but, from that moment, it is the whole eye which doubles its optical function by a specifically 'grabbing* [haptique] one, if we follow RiegFs formula for a touching which is specific to the gaze" (1989,12). To me, Deleuze's focus on filmic images of hands seems a bit unnecessary in terms of evoking a sense of the haptic. Looking at hands would seem to evoke the sense of touch through identi fication, either with the perso n whose han ds they are or with t he hands themselves; The haptic bypasses such identification and the distance from the image it requires. A writer whose use of "haptic cinema" is most similar to my own is Jacinto Lejeira (1996), who dis cusses the relation between haptic and optical visuality in the work of Atom Egoyan. He notes that Egoyan uses different processes, such as speeding up video footage in the film, enlarging the grain, and creating mises-en-abime of video within film, to create a more or less optical or haptic sensation. "These techniques function in such a way that the overall i m a g e . . . seems to obey an instrument capable of bringing the spectator's opticality or tactility to a vibratory pitch of greater or lesser intensity" (1996, 44). I agree with Lejeira that these visual variations are not formal matters alone but have impli cations for how the viewer relates bodily to the image (46) ,16 How does cinema achieve a haptic character? Many prohaptic
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properties are com mon to video and film, such as changes in focus, graininess (achieved differently in each medium), and effects of g under- and overexposure. All of these discourage the viewer from pS distinguishing objects and encourage a relationship to the screen as i j a whole. Haptic images may raise ontological questions about the *o tr ut h of photographic repr esentation: this is the effect of the repro£ du ced image in films such as Blow-Up (1966, Michelangelo Antoo nioni), Sans soleil (1982, Chris Marker], and works by Atom Egoyan H that employ video within the film (for example, Family Viewing, 1987, and Calendar, 1993). Haptic images may also encourage a more embodied and multisensory relationship to the image in films that use haptic imagery in combination with sound, camera movement, and montage to achieve sensuous effects, such as The Piano (1993, Jane Campion) and Like Water for Chocolate (1993, Alfonso Arau). Both film and video become more haptic as they die. Every time we watch a film, we witness its gradual decay: another scratch, more fading as it is exposed to the light, and chemical deterioration, espe cially with color film. Video decays more rapidly than film, quickly becoming a trace, a lingering aroma with few visual referents re maining. As the tape demagnetizes, lines drop out, and in analog video color becomes distorted. Video decay is especially signifi cant for emigrants and exiles who treasure old, hard-to-get, or boot legged tapes from "back home." Because they are so hard to find, these videos quickly lose their status as mechanically reproduced media and become rare, unique, and precious objects. 17 A tape that deals poignantly with video decay is Sniff (1996) by Ming-Yuen S. Ma, who has used haptic imagery in several works, including Aura (1991) and Slanted Vision (1995). In this short tape, the decay of the video image evokes the failure of memory. A man, played by Ma, crawls naked on his bed, bendi ng to the sheets to search for traces of smells. Repetitively, Ma's voice-over describes his one-night stands: "M came over last night. He had two scoops of ice cream, and some chocolate." Though the telling is coy, the increasing desperation of his search makes this a work not only about the transience of love, but also about loss in th e time of AIDS. Optical images of Ma crawl ing on the bed give way to tactile close-ups, for example, of the individual hairs gleaming on his shorn scalp. Finally, through ana log dubbing, the image begins to break down: it loses its coherence the way smell particles disperse, taking memory away with them. 172
57 and 58. Stills from Sniff
Other haptic effects are medium-specific. In film, techn iqu es such as optical printing, solarization, and scratching the emulsion work with the physical surface of the medium. For this reason it is com monly argued that film is a tactile medi um and video an optical one, since film can be actually worked with the hands. My definition of visual tactility, however, has little to do with physical texture and mainly to do with the way the eye is compelled to "touch" an object in the way I have described. The techniques noted above do not ne c essarily make a film look tactile. However, optical printing can build up many layers of images on the film, producing a thicket of barely legible images. Many experimental filmmakers have used optical printing and physically worked the emulsion to achieve effects that
59- Frame enlargement from Girl from Moush. Courtesy of Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.
can be described as haptic. The works of a relative newcomer to the tradition, Canadian filmmaker Garine Torossian, Visions (1991), Girl from Moush (1993), and Drowning in Flames (1994) make a nod to postmodernism in that the images they draw from are already once-reproduced: photographs, reproductions of artworks, images shot from a video monitor. However, Torossian physically reworks these images in a way that thoroughly restores their aura, or endows them wit h another aura. Every frame contains two or more optically printed images and more images that Torossian cuts out and glues onto the film. Many frames are scratched for additional texture, or discolored and bubbled by the glue she uses. Her sound tracks are similarly layered and dense. To look at these works is to be drawn into a world where scale is completely different, as though one has to become miniaturized like Alice in Wonderland in order to per ceive the complex texture of the films. These richly textured, minia ture scenes compel a viewer to move close, yet they also multiply points of visual contact all over the screen. At th e same time, they inhibit identification with the pictured objects, so that in Girl From Moush the icons of the artist's ancestral country, Armenia, including churches like those featured in Egoyan's Calendar, are ever more dif-
ficult to distinguish, let alone to fetishize as the photographer of Cal- 175 endar does. Torossian says that the densely worked surfaces of her films pay homage to her Armen ian aun ts' and grandmoth ers' knit^ ting and crocheting (Hoolboom 1997,149,151; Torossian 1998). Like <*> the sweaters and doilies they produced, her films embody hours of CD women's labor in the complexity of their textures. o For 16mm and 35mm film, the contrast ratios (ratios of light to 0 dark areas of the image) approximate human vision, or about 300:1 g3 a (Belton 1996, 71). Their grain is not visible under normal conditions (unless you sit too close to the screen). However, the grain of 8mm film is easily visible, as is the grain of higher-gauge film shot at high speed or in low light. Graininess certainly produces a tac tile quality, as the eye may choose between concentrating on figures and ignoring the points that make them up or bracketing the fig ures and dissolving among the points. Interestingly, it can also be the high resolution of film that gives it a tactile quality. Films that, like Torossian's, seem to contain more visual texture than the eye can apprehend, have the effect of overwhelming vision and spilling into other sense perceptions. The main sources of haptic visuality in video are more varied: they include the constitution of the image from a signal, video's low contrast ratio, the possibilities of electronic an d digital imaging, and video decay. The video image occurs in a relay between source and screen. As Ron Burnett (1995) and others note, the video image's status as index is less secure th an that of the film image, since it does not originate from a material object (of celluloid/acetate). Hence variations in image quality, color, tonal variation, and so forth occur in the space between source and viewer, affected by conditions of broadcast or exhibition as well as (literal) reception. Control of the image is much more open to negotiation in video, while in film the qualities of the image are chemical effects that cannot be signifi cantly changed after the film has been processed. 18 Another source of video's tactile, or at least insufficiently visual, qualities is its pixel density and contrast ratio. VHS has about 350,000 pixels per frame, while 35mm film has twenty times that (Bordwell and Thompson 1997, 31). The contrast ratio of video, or ratio of dark to light areas in the image, is 30:1, or approximately one-tenth of that of 16mm or 35mm film (Belton 1996, 71). Thus while film approximates the degree of detail of hu ma n vision, video
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provides much less detail. When vision yields to the diminished ca pacity of video, it must give up some degree of mastery; our vision g dissolves in the unfulfilling or unsatisfactory space of video. The E same effects can occur in multigenerational or badly recorded video jjj images—but their implications are quite different, for in these works *o the viewer is more likely to find the image's blurriness merely a 3 frustration and not an invitation to perceive in a different way. o A third intrinsic quality of the video med ium, and an imporH tant source of video tactility, is its electronic manipulability (see Herzogenrath 1977). The tactile quality of the video image is most apparent in the work of videomakers who experiment with the dis appearance and transformation of the image due to analog and digi tal effects. Electronic effects such as pixellation can render the ob ject indistinct while drawing attention to the per ception of textures. Pixelvision, the format of the discontinued Fisher-Price toy camera that used audiocassete tapes, 19 is an ideal haptic medium. Pixelvision, which cannot focus on objects in depth, pays a curious atten tion to objects and surfaces in extreme close-up. As a result, some of the best Pixelvision works focus on scenes of detail. Yau Ching's three Video Letters (all 1993) take advantage of the medium's visual poverty to suggest all that cannot be conveyed in a letter, using simple still lifes to create recollection-objects. Azian Nurudin's les bian s/m scenes in Sinar Durjana (Wicked Radiance) (1992) and Bitter Strength: Sadistic Response Version (1992) become elegantly abstract in Pixelvision; she uses the high contrast of the medium to echo the effects of Malaysian shadow plays. In utter contrast to McLuhan and the many critics who followed him in asserting that video is a "cool" and distancing medium, I ar gue that video's tactile qualities make it a warm medium. It is the crisp resolution into optical visuality that makes an image cool and distant. Uses of Haptics
The haptic qualities I have described can be found in many works. Independent film- and videomakers have experimented with haptic visuality throughout the history of the media. Borrowing these tech niques, commercial movies also make occasional use of haptic visu ality. The opening-credit sequences of many movies take place over
haptic images, as though to slowly ease the viewer into the story. I 177 have noticed this, for example, in the opening sequences of Casino (1995, Martin Scorsese), where big blurry colored lights eventually ,-3 reveal themselves to be the marquee of a casino; The English Patient ® (Anthony Minghella, 1996), in wh ic h the camera moves over a skin- CD 3 like surface that turns out to be a close-up of rough watercolor paper; o and The Usual Suspects (1995, Bryan Singer), wh ic h begins with a 0 very dark ground with wavy colored shapes, reflections of lights in the harbor. Films like these are predicated on the audience's uncertain or false knowledge, and so it seems appropriate to begin them with haptic images that make viewers unsure of their relationship to the image and the knowledge it implies. Intercultural films and videos take advantage of the haptic quali ties of their media in a number of ways. Fundamentally, haptic images refuse visual plenitude. Thus they offer another of the Deleuzian time-image strategies to prevent an easy connection to nar rative, instead encouraging the viewer to engage with the image through memory. As fetishes protect their memories, haptic images can protect the viewer from the image, or the image from the viewer. It is fairly common for experimental ethnographic films and videos to use haptic images to counter viewers' expectations of informative or exotic visual spectacle. Hatoum's Measures of Distance (1988) protects its images from viewers' realization that we are gazing upon a naked woman, until it resolves into an optical image. Works that mediate between cultures, such as Trinh's Re Assemblage (1982), Marker's Sans soleil (1982) and Edin Velez's Meta Mayan II (1981), occasionally "clothe" their ethnographic images in soft focus or elec tronically processed textures. Portia Cobb's videos Species in Dan ger Ed (1989) and Drive By Shoot (1994) and Lawrence Andrews's "and they came riding into town on Black and Silver Horses" (1992) represent young Black urban men, people who are usually subject to ethnographic scrutiny on the nightly news, but swathe their images in digital graininess and layers of multiple exposure. Ken Feingold's faux-ethnography Un Chien Delicieux (1990) shifts to tasteful digi tization for the only truly "documentary" portion of the tape, in which the Burmese villagers he is taping kill and cook a dog. New View/New Eyes (1993), a tape made by Gitanjali on her first visit to her ancestral country, India, is symptomatic of the reluctant-tourist strategies of experimental documentary. Unwilling to subject the
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6o. Frame enlargement from Chimera. Courtesy
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land and its people, especially the very poor, to her camera, the art ist seeks blurry images, like the reflection in puddles of "untouch ables" sweeping a wet courtyard on a misty morning. Many of the works I discuss in this book make similar protective gestures toward the people and places they represent. Haptic images can give the impression of seeing for the first time, gradually discovering what is in the image rather than coming to the image already knowing what it is. Several such works represent the point of view of a disoriented traveler unsure how to read the world in which he finds himself. Bill Viola's Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) (1979), for example, gives a view of the Tuni sian Sahara not with the certain knowledge of Baedeker-clutching tourists but with disorientation and wonder, the shimmering desert reflected in the air. Phil Hoffman's Chimera (1995) is composed of shots at dozens of sites around that world that begin and end in blurred motion, so that a "cut on blur" reproduces the tourist's ex perien ce as a sea of uncertainty punctuated by moments of clear perception. In Brasiconoscopio (1990), Mauro Giuntini sees anew his town of Brasilia, the prototype of the chilly, optical city, with haptic eyes, in a series of scenes that use slow motion, painterly digital effects, and blurring and blossoming colors to blu r its inhabi tants together in a great flow of life. Another artist who sees mirages is Seoungho Cho, who writes, describing The Island with Striped
6i. Still from The Island with Striped Sky. Courtesy of
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! 62. Still from Identical Time. Courtesy of Seoungho Cho.
Sky (Seoungho Cho and Sang-Wook Cho, 1993): "Prolonged expo
sure and thirst may indu ce one to experience a mirage in the desert. The mirage is filtered through undulating waves of air. In this video, the mirage of the city is captured through its reflection" (Cho 1994). The island of the title is Manhattan, and the tape reflects a profound sense of the traveller's disorientation. Meanings float loose from objects and merge; reflections in puddles, windows, and revolving doors are at least as palpable as the insubstantial figures of moving people and vehicles.
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The Th e first image im age in Ch Cho's o's Identical Time (1 (199 997) 7) is light lig ht comin com ingg through curving white filaments, with bright spots of red and green light behi be hind nd them. As the focus focus shorten sho rtens, s, it turn tu rnss out we are looklooking in g t h r o u g h t h e w i n d o w of a subw su bway ay car ca r i n w h i c h some so mebo body dy h as scratched a name. nam e. Identical Time, shot in the New York subways over the th e course cou rse of of a year, wring wri ngss beaut be autyy out of of the th e or ordin dinary ary things thin gs most mos t riders ride rs ignore, by render ren dering ing them th em firs firstt as haptic hap tic images. The images are paired pai red with wit h an exquisite exquisit e score fo forr string ins trumen tru ments ts by Steven Stev en Vitiello, whic wh ichh ranges rang es from from a gentle gentl e melody mel ody on a guitar to the hars ha rshh scraping scrapi ng of of cello strings in an aural echo to the lines scratched scratc hed into the window. During the course of the tape, words at the bottom of the screen read: Today I am alive and without nostalgia the night flows The city flows I write on this page that flows I shuttle with these shuttling words lam one pulsebeat in the throbbing river Is not beauty enough? I know nothing I know what is too much not what is enough There is another time tim e within wit hin time still with wit h no hour s no weight no sh adow without past or future only alive like the old man on the bench indivisible identical perpetual We never see it It is transparency They are excerpts from a translation of Octavio Paz's poem "El Mismo Tiempo" (1961). The tape, like the poem, is a song for the sort of travelers who become "one pulsebeat in the throbbing river"
63. Still from Identical Time. Courtesy of Seoungho Cho.
when they enter the subways, travelers who, looking up from their newspapers, might lose their gaze in a delicate pattern of vertical lines that turns tur ns out to be droplets of of rain and dust, dried on the sub sub way window. Such contemplative opportunities are not as rare as one might think, even, or especially, on the subway. Cho's videos dwell on the tactile qualities of seeing, at the same time that they question the ability of vision to yield knowledge. He connects this kind of bafQed vision with the experience of cul tural displacement—both the displacement of a Korean-born per son living in the United States and the general displacement of the tourist, or anyone living with the daily sensory barrage of Manhat tan (Cho 1997). Figures cannot be clearly distinguished, and layers of images move in an uncertain relation to the plane of the lens. Unsure what he or she is seeing, the disoriented viewer suspends judgment (unless he or she makes a snap judgment, hastening hasteni ng the images into intelligibility), and tests the images by bringing them close. The viewer's vision takes a tactile relation to the surface of the image, moving over the figures that merge in the image plane as though even faraway things are only an inch from one's body. Looking in such a way requires of the viewer a certain trust, that the objects of vision are not menacing but will patiently wait to be seen. Yet one might ask whether Cho trusts his senses: in his work all materiality seems to disappear, and the images that swirl to the screen's surfac surfacee do not necessarily attest to the existence of objects. objects.
Some interc int ercultu ultural ral works work s use us e the shif shiftt betwee bet weenn haptic hapt ic and opti cal ways of seeing to emphasize the makers' tactile connection to g their environments. environ ments. Rather Rather than tha n represent repres ent well-known and beloved E places in the har sh light light of optical vision, they begin with wit h the intirS mate ma te look of one wh o already alre ady kn know owss what wh at he or she is going to see "o (though (tho ugh viewers view ers may not share sh are this th is familiarity). Victor Victor Masayesva's ;g Hopiit (1982) uses us es hapt ha ptic ic images to touc to uchh affectionately affectionately the t he ordio nary nar y things that are the center of of his Hopi community. communi ty. The tape is is H struct str uct ured ure d by the annual annua l life life cycle of corn, and by the special cele br b r atio at ionn s a n d ever ev eryd yday ay acts ac ts r ela el a ted te d to it. Like Lik e Ch Cho, o, Masa Ma saye yesv svaa often changes exposure or focus very slowly, allowing the object of vision to emerge gradually from its environment. The green leaves of corn pl p l a n t s , a pp ppll e blos bl osso soms ms,, and an d a spid sp ider er work wo rkin ingg on its it s web we b emer em erge ge into focus gradually, as as though tho ugh to stress that all these things, thi ngs, includ includ ing the viewer, are interconnected. The videomaker uses a similar strategy in Ram Hakim Hopiit (19 (1985) 85) a n d Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms (1991) in a gestur ges turee towar to wardd his enviro env ironme nment nt that th at is simulta simu lta neously loving and protective. Masayesva's use of soft focus implies an affectionate and intimate relationship with things too familiar to require the close scrutiny of the optical. Similarly, Philip Mallory Jones's videos, installations, and digital works use haptic imagery in a conscious effort to convey the multisensory environment of the places he visits throughout the African diaspora. Composed of scenes from villages in Burkina Faso, his "music videos" Wassa (1989) and Jembe (1989) are electronically pr p r o c ess es s ed to e n h a n c e t heir he ir t ext ex t u r e a n d r ich ic h color. colo r. Wassa moves in dreamlike dream like slow motion motio n to the music mus ic of Houstaph Hous taphaa Thiohbiano: fro from m the th e combinati combi nation on of rhy rhythm thm,, color, color, and video textur e, the viewer gets a sense of warmth and fragrance emanating from shots of boys play ing in a dusty street and a woman moving languidly in a dim room. Jones's search searc h for for a pan-African aesthetic, aestheti c, whi ch has developed develo ped into the multimedia work in progress First World Order, makes him less a tourist than an inhabitant of a global Africa: I will return to Jones's work on the "African sensorium" in the next chapter.
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Haptic Sound
Although Alth ough this t his book remain rem ainss largely silent on the question quest ion of sound, soun d, I find it interesting to note that sound operates along a dialectic simi-
lar to that of haptic and optical visuality visuality.. Of Of course we cannot liter 183 ally touch sound with wit h our ears, just as we cannot touch t ouch images images with wit h our eyes; but as vision can be optical or haptic, so too hearing can perceive the environment in a more or less instrume inst rumental ntal way. way. We We listen for specific things, while we hear ambient ambient sound as an undifferentiated ferentiated whole. One might call "haptic hearing" that usually brief brief BO moment when all all sounds present themselves to us undifferentiated, O t-b before before we make the choice of which whi ch sounds sound s are most important impor tant to attend to. In some environments the experience of haptic hearing can be sustained for longer, before specific sounds focus our atten tion: quiet environments like walking walking in the woods and lying in bed in the morning, or overwhelming overwhelmingly ly loud lo ud ones like a nightclub nightclu b dance floor or a construction constru ction site. In these settings settings the aural boundaries be tween body and world may may fee feell indist i ndistinct inct:: the rustle ru stle of the trees tr ees may mingle with the sound of my breathing, or conversely the booming music may inhabit my chest cavity and move my body from the in side. In side. In sound cinema, the relationship between aural textures and aural signs can be as complex as the relationship between haptic and optical image imagess to which I have devoted my attention. attenti on. CD
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Haptics and Erotics
Haptic visuality visuality requires require s the viewer to work to constitute consti tute the image, to bring it forth from from latency. It resembles resemb les what w hat Sobchack (1 (199 9922, 93), using the terms of existential phenomenology, calls volitional, delib erate vision: the act of viewing viewing is one in i n which both I and the object object of my vision constitute each other. In this mutually constitutive ex change change I find the germ of of an intersubjective eroticism. By "intersub "int ersub- jective" jective" I mean capable of a mutual mut ual relation relati on of recognition, r ecognition, in this case between a beholder and a work of cinema. Regardless of their content, haptic images are erotic in that they construct an inter subjective relationship between beholder and image. The viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the traces the image leaves. By interacting up close close with an image, image, close close enough that figure and ground commingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense of separateness from the image—not to know it, but to give herself up to her desire for it. This description will suggest that haptic visuality is somewhat different from the Brechtian stance of the active viewer often in-
voked in theories of experimental film and in 1970s semiotic and psy ps y choa ch oana naly lyti ticc "scr "s cree eenn theory the ory." ." Cert Ce rtai ainl nlyy h apt ap t i c visu vi sual alit ityy req re q uir ui r es an active viewer. As in modernist cinema, the haptic viewer relates simultaneously to an illusionistic image and a material object, and thus implicitly refuses to be seduced by the cinematic illusion. But the Brechtian active viewer is an explicitly critical viewer, indeed a suspicious viewer, while the haptic viewer is quite willing to pull the wool over her eyes. Put otherwise, haptic visuality does imply a critique of mastery, the mastery implicit in optical visuality, but it is through a desiring and often pleasurable relationship to the image that this critique is bodied forth. Voyeurism relies on maintaining the distance between viewer and viewed. Eroticism closes that distance and implicates the viewer in the viewed. As Emmanuel Levinas writes, "The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know kn ow what it seeks. This 'not knowin kno win g/ this thi s fundamental fundame ntal disorder, is the essential. It is like a game with something slipping away, a game absolutely without project or plan, not with what can become ours or us, but with something other, always other, always inacces sible, and always still to come" (1989, 51). The erotic for Levinas, and for Irigaray, is not the possessing of the other but a "delight in the resistant alterity of the erotic other" (Davies 1993, 268). Visual erotics allows the object of vision to remain inscrutable. 20 But it is not voyeurism, for in visual erotics the looker is also implicated. By engaging with an object in a haptic way, I come to the surface of my self (like Riegl hunched over his Persian carpets), losing myself in the intensified relation with an other that cannot be possessed. Again, let me exaggerate the dichotomy between optical and hap tic visuality to make a point. The ideal relationship between viewer and image in optical visuality tends to be one of mastery, in which the viewer isolates an d comp co mpre rehen hen ds the t he objects objects of of vision. The ideal relationship between viewer and image in haptic visuality is one of mutuality, in which the viewer is more likely to lose herself in the image, to lose her sense of proportion. When vision is like touch, the object's touch back may be like a caress, though it may also be violent, as Steven Shaviro argues—a violence not toward the image bu b u t t o w a r d t h e viewe vi ewer. r. Viol Vi olen ence ce may ma y occu oc curr i n an a b r u p t shift from haptic hap tic to optical image, confronting the viewer with an object object whole who le and distant where she had been contemplating it close-up and par-
Hapti c visuality visu ality implie imp liess a tensi ten sion on betw be twee eenn viewer view er and an d image, image , 185 tial. Haptic then, because this violent potential is always there. Haptic visuality implies imp lies making mak ing oneself vulner vul nerabl ablee to the th e image, reversi reve rsing ng the th e rela- _3 ° tion of mastery that characterizes optical viewing. These qualities may begin to suggest the particu par ticular lar erotic aspect © of haptic cinema. 21 As the metalworks metalw orks and carpets carpe ts of which wh ich Riegl Riegl o wrote engage engage wit h vision on their surface rather rath er than th an drawing drawin g it into ^ what g3 an illusionary illusio nary dept d epth, h, so haptics hapt ics move eroticism erotici sm from from the t he site of of what is repres rep resente entedd to the surface of the image. Eroticism occurs occur s in the o way a viewer engages in a dialectical movement between the sur face and the depth of the image. In short, the form of visuality I am describing is itself erotic; the fact that some of the images are sexual is, is , in effect, icing on the cake. Nevertheless, let me describe a work that is erotic both in its use of haptic visuality and in its content, namely Her Sweetness Lingers (1 (199 994) 4) by Shani Mootoo—the Mootoo—t he tap t apee with the magnolia. Mootoo is a poet, and the love poem she reads on the sound track is responsible for much of the sensual quality of the tape: not only its evocative evocative words, word s, bu t the rich ri ch voice that carries each phrase on a current of breath. "I'm afraid," are her first, whis per p eree d wor wo r d s; "I'm "I 'm afraid afr aid of dyi d ying ng.. . . . Why Wh y else el se w o u l d I be afraid afr aid to touch you, when I have not allowed my mind to lie fallow beneath this fear? I know the texture of your lips, inside of mine. I have already tasted your tongue, and smelled your face and neck, again and again, without ever having touched you—I don't want to—be cause, I'm afraid of dying." As she speaks, we see a group of women in a beautiful garden. One is captured in slow motion jumping on a trampoline, the impact echoing in a deep boom that emphasizes her phallic intentness; another laughs and turns her lovely face as though thou gh unawar una waree of the camera's c amera's gaze. Like Mootoo's words , the cam era tentatively circles around this woman, and then it drifts away across the grass; then the tape cuts to a circling close-up of a halfopen magnolia. On one hand, this and similar cuts, to images of flowers and a gushing waterfall, evoke the lover's averting her eyes from the beloved; on the other, given the sexual symbolism of the images, they are outrageously explicit, a kind of poet's Production Code for erotic contact. Keyed-in, digitally colorized shots of scarlet quince blossoms, grape hyacinths with a wandering bee, and yellow forsythia against the bright blue sky recall the dense textures and vivid colors of Persian Persi an minia min iatu ture res. s. The intim int imacy acy of these th ese shots, sho ts, suf-
64. Still from Her Sweetness Lingers. Courtesy of Video Out.
fused with the buzzing sounds of insects in the garden, overwhelms the viewer with their immediacy, with even a sense of humidity on the skin. Mootoo's voice continues to erotically proclaim the value of keeping a distance: Watching you, desiring you for so long, I know that at the moment when our skins will finally come together—unite—our melting passion will pulse like an unborn wave, at first imperceptible, then slowly gathering, gather ing itself up, to make a show of fearless strength before bursting apart in momentary splendor—then heedlessly pushing on, uncaring that ahead is its pathetic demise. Wave after wave, not one wise enough to see the pat tern, and seeing, hold onto life by refusing to be born. At one point the camera slowly pans the beloved woman's body as she reclines nak ed in a dim room, digital effects denaturalizing her brown skin to a luminous pale green, a sort of video veil over the body of the beloved. Finally, after the poet's reasoning has come full circle, the two women in the garden ever so slowly approach each other, brief shots from different angles capturing the longanticipated meeting; and just as they bring their lips together, the tape ends. But another consummation has already been achieved, in the video's tactile, sensuously saturated caresses. Her Sweetness Lingers embroiders its colorful and sumptuous optical images with the intimacy of tactile images: it expresses the greedy desire of a
lover to know the beloved thro ugh every sense all at once, to admire the beloved from a distance and at the same time bring her or him close. Mootoo's words—the passion to be unite d with the beloved in "momentary splendor," even if this should herald the lover's demise —describe the self-eclipsing desire that propels hap tic visuality.
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Haptics and Identification
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Haptic visuality implies a familiarity with the world that the viewer
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knows through more senses Qian vision alone. Changes of focus and distance, switches between haptic and optical visual styles, de scribe the movement between a tactile relationship and a visual one. I noted that in Hatoum's Measures of Distance, as the grainy image gradually resolves into figuration, we realize that the stills are of a woman's body, and th en that they are of the artist's mother. This pulling-back powerfully evokes a child's gradual realization of separateness from its mother, and the accompanying ability to rec ognize objects: to recognize the mother's body as a separate body that is also desired by someone else. It parallels the developmetal shift from the "close" senses to the distance senses. It also describes a movement from a haptic way of seeing to a more optical way of seeing: the figure is separate, complete, objectifiable, and indeed already claimed by another, Hatoum's father. It is perhaps not co incidental that a number of haptic images are made by daughters of their mothers. Another example is Beharry's Seeing Is Believing, in which the artist's camera searches a photograph of her mother, following the folds of the silk sari in the photograph as they too dis solve into grain and resolve again. Such images evoke a tactile mirror stage in which the infant's awareness of belovedness and separation is learned in terms of touch. At the moment that the viewer forgets the body, haptic images fill in for the missing body (Lejeira 1996,46], as the tactile folds of the sari fill the screen. But at the point where the image becomes recognizable as that of a woman in a sari, narra tive rushes in: to use Deleuzian terminology, the movement-image returns. These observations about infant's-eye vision lead to some sugges tions about identification and the haptic. As I have argued, haptic media encourage a relation to the screen itself before the point at which the viewer is pulled into the figures of the image and the
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exhortation of the narrative. Haptic identification is predicated on closeness, rather tha n the distance that allows the beholder to imagig natively project onto the object. S The haptic is a form of visuality that muddies intersubjective Jj boundaries, as I have been arguing in phenomenological terms. If *o we were to describe it in psychoanalytic terms, we might argue that £ haptics draw on an erotic relation that is organized less by a phalo lie economy than by the relationship bet ween mother and infant. In H this relatio nship, the subject (the infant) comes into being through the dynamic play between the appearance of wholeness with the other (the mother) and the awareness of being distinct. As Parveen Adams (1991) suggests, to define sexuality in terms of the relation to the mother is also to understand it as organized around a basic bisexuality. This seems to corroborate a kind of visuality that is not organized around identification, at least identification with a single figure, but that is labile, able to move between identification and immersion. In a sexual positioning that oscillates between motherand father-identification, it seems that haptic visuality is on the side of the mother. Haptic visuality might seem to represent the "overcloseness to the image" that Mary An n Doane (1987) and others have attributed to female spectatorship, while optical visuality implies the ability to stand coolly back that characterizes "regular" spec tatorship. I can only remind the reader that I base haptic visuality on a phenomenological understanding of embodied spectatorship, which is fundamentally distinct from the Lacanian psychoanalytic model that castigates the "over-close" viewer for being stuck in an illusion. Though, as I have mentioned, the use of haptic images may be a feminist strategy, there is nothing essentially feminine about it.22 This excursus aside, my concern is not to anchor the definition of haptic visuality in certain psychoanalytic positions. I find it more compelling to suggest how haptic visuality works at the level of the entire body. The engagement of haptic visuality occurs not simply in psychic registers but in the sensorium. The longing communi cated by Measures of Distance and Seeing Is Believing cannot be explained solely by an analysis of the cultural dynamics they ex ploit or the psychic states they bring into play. The eroticism of Her Sweetness Lingers, the sense of connectedness to the community in Haj-Ismail's and Masayesva's works, and the experience of the place-
65. Installation view, Corps etranger. Photo: Philippe
Migeat. Courtesy of Mona Hatoum.
less traveler in Cho's tapes also appeal to the body and not only the psyche. To describe the effects of s uch video works requir es paying attention to the viewer's body, specifically what happens when the video image dissolves out toward the viewer and invites the viewer to invest all his or her senses in the act of seeing. A later work by Mona Hatoum demonstrates disturbingly the dif ference between embodied visuality and vision that enters the body. To make Corps etranger (1996), the artist used an endoscopic cam era, attached to a medical probe that can be inserted into the body's orifices. The camera begins by traveling over the surface of Hatoum's body, expanses of skin and looming facial features and nipples. Then it (and in a kind of Incredible Journey, the viewer too) moves over her teeth and plunges down her throat, taking us on a visceral jour ney into her (healthy-looking) esophagus. The camera takes a similar voyage into her intestine and her cervix, making visible an archi tecture of glistening walls and pools of visceral fluid. The piece was conceived as an installation in which the tape loops, so the viewer is never "brought back out" from Hatoum's insides.
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The question of identification in this tape is perplexing. As my wording suggests, it is easier to identify wit h Hatoum's camera than g wit h her body, which becomes a terrain throug h whi ch we travel. E When we do identify with her body the effect is deeply unsettling, i j I believe because it is impossible to function when we are aware *o of our bodies' noncognitive processes suc h as digestion and respi£ ration. Medical technologies such as X rays, ultrasound, CAT scans,
Tactile Epistemology: A Return
I have discussed ho w haptic cinema appeals strongly to a viewer per ceiving wit h all the senses. Let me re turn to the notion of tactile epis temology wit h which I began, to think further about the significance of haptic visuality. Tactile epistemology involves thinking with your skin, or giving as much significance to the physical presence of an other as to the mental operations of symbolization. This is not a call to willful regression but to recognizing the intelligence of the per ceiving body. Haptic cinema, by appearing to us as an object with which we interact rather than an illusion into which we enter, calls up on this sort of embodied and mimetic intelligence. In the dynamic movement between optical and haptic ways of seeing, it is possible to compare different ways of knowing and interacting with an other.
The above exploration of haptic visuality permits us to reconsider 191 the now-com mon critique of visuality as bent on mastery. Evidently this critique need not be extended to all forms of vision. A form ^ of vision that yields to the thing seen, a vision that exceeds cogni- ® tion, seems to escape the critique of mastery. Haptic visuality may CD "fasten" on its object (according to its etymology), bu t it cannot pr eo tend fully to know the thing seen. Instead, haptic visuality inspires ^ an acute awareness that the thing seen evades vision and must be g3 a p p r o a ch e d t h r o u g h o t h e r s en s e s — w h i c h are no t literally available n 1
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in cinema. Haptic visuality implies a fundamental mourning of the absent object or the absent body, where optical visuality attempts to resuscitate it and make it whole. At the same time that it ac knowledges that it cannot know the other, haptic visuality attempts to bring it close, in a look that is so intensely involved with the presence of the other that it cannot take the step back to discern dif ference, say, to distinguish figure and ground. A visuality that is so engaged with the present that it cannot recede into cognition would seem to inform the kind of "yielding-knowing" of which Taussig (1993,45), following Horkheimer and Adorno's plea (1987) for a form of knowledge that did not bend its object to its will, writes. The various ways theorists have written of vision/knowledge as an act of yielding, of giving over to its object, can be critiqued as exoticizing, organicist, romantic—Taussig's summoning of Cuna ritual practices; Levinas's seemingly occult attribution of cognitionarresting power to "the face of the Other"; even Trinh's call to "speak not about, but nearby." But perhaps these potential criticisms can be averted if we accept that it is necessarily through metaphor that we approach such models of knowledge. It is difficult to describe such a state, except indirectly. Hence the power of cinema to offer a way of speaking not about, but nearby, its object: a power of approach ing its object with only the desire to caress it, not to lay it bare. A videotape by Brazilian artist Ines Cardoso, Diastole (1994), uses haptic visuality to poetically app roach an ineffable object. Dedicated to a loved one who died, Diastole is a brief and moving meditation on death, occupied with only a few images. It makes use of the wide range of resolution possible in video, and manipulates color with extreme subtlety, from naturalistic to digitally altered. The image of the moving hands of an old-fashioned clock appears in clear focus, in the subtle tones of a daylit interior. An image of two children
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laughing and rolling on a be d is slightly pixellated, giving a pointillist effect to the dark expanse of their hair and the glowing edges of the tumbled sheets. Other images, shot through various filtering devices, play overtly with the inability to see what you are looking at: a barely recognizable, sunlit outdoor scene turns out to be shot through a sheet of bubble wrap; a ha nd is shot thr ough a fine plastic screen. What captures me most is this last image. The ha nd gently presses against the screen, and as it does its boundaries blur and merge with the even mesh of the screen, which in turn merges with the digital texture of the video image. Colors shimmer around it in the camera's reaction to overexposure: pastel, barely there colors, bluegreen, a pinkish flesh tone, edged with darkness but dissolving into light. As the image of the hand dissolves into the double grain of the screen and the video image, the sound track carries the voice of a child reading a poem about death (translated from Portuguese into English subtitles). The tape ends with the words, "How can we ever understand death?" Perhaps this seems a diagrammatic illustration of a haptic medium: a verbal text about the limits of knowability re inforcing a visual play with the limits of visibility. Nevertheless, the result is an expression of respect and relinquishment at the border of the unknowable experience of death. The optical image dissolves into the intimacy of the haptic, in a reverent nonunderstanding in the face of death. Tactile visuality is still not touch. Often there is a mournful quality to the haptic images I have described, for as much as they might attempt to touch the skin of the object, all they can achieve is to become skinlike themselves. The point of tactile visuality is not to supply a plenitude of tactile sensation to make up for a lack of opti cal image. Similarly, when in the next chapter I discuss images that evoke senses such as smell and taste, it is not to call for a "sensurround" fullness of experience, a total sensory environment, to miti gate the thinness of the image. Rather it is to point to the limits of sensory knowledge. By shifting from one form of sense-perception to another, the image points to its own asymptotic, caressing rela tion to the real, and to the same relation between perception and the image. What is erotic about haptic visuality, then, may be described as a respect of difference, and concomitant loss of self, in the presence of
the other. Unlike the alterity posed by Freud or Lacan, or Hegel for 193 that matter, this difference is not the means of "shattering" the sub ject. The giving-over to the other that characterizes haptic visuality ^ is an elastic, dynamic movement, not the rigid all-or-nothing switch ® between an illusion of self-sufficiency and a realization of absolute o lack. It is with the same recognition that Sobchack describes the o relation between perceiver and perceived as one of mutual embodi- 0 ment, dynamic rather than destructive. gj It may be more obvious now why intercultural works deploy hap- o tic visuality. The apprehension of being seen, categorized, and killed into knowledge informs many works that speak from a place be tween cultures, given the ethnographic (in the broad sense) ten dency to fix its object in a harsh light, or conversely to flatten its object into a broad projection screen. The critique of visual mastery in such works speaks from an awareness about the destructive and literally imperialist potential of vision. For the same reason, inter cultural cinema is one of the most important sites of work on nonmastering visuality. From an impulse to protect the objects (people, cultures) represented from the prying eyes of others that informs much intercultural cinema, some works also begin to experiment with a visual erotics: one that offers its object to the viewer but only on the condition that its unknowability remain intact. As I will ex plore further in the next chapter, some works stretch the medium's ability to represent the valued senses, including touch, that slip be yond the capacities of a Western-style apparatus. And finally, haptic visuality, in its effort to touch the image, may represent the difficulty of remembering the loved one, be it a person or a homeland.
4 The memory of the senses
Any hint of flavor, just a hint, leads through a tunnel back to a light: the memory of my favorite stew. I never had words for it in the first place, although, when I am inebriated with memory, emotions about the ghostly meal rattle around. —Jeff Weinstein, "Thyme and Word Enough" Seeing is not eating.—-Hausa proverb There has been increasing interest in the past several years among film- and videomakers and "visual" artists to supplement vision with the experiences of hearing, touch, smell, taste, and kinesthesis. Es pecially in documentary, this turn to the nonvisual senses has been in part a response to the perceived imperialism of vision, the align ment of visual information with knowledge and control (although, as I argued in the last chapter, vision need not be synonymous with mastery). In some cases, documentary appeals to what escapes the visual altogether but can be known, for example, through the sense of touch, or of smell. The knowledge of the other senses is sought, not necessarily to create a sort of multisensory gesamtkunstwerk, but to show the limits of any of these knowledges. Throughout these chapters I have been suggesting that unrepre sentable memories find their expression in the characteristic gaps of experimental cinema, or what Deleuze calls time-image cinema. The "shattering of the sensory-motor schema" (Deleuze 1989, 55) that characterizes time-image cinema describes a suspension of the usual relations among the senses and their automatic extension into movement. I suggest that the very perceptual forms that encode
mem ory may be revealed, by this shattering effect, to be culturally 195 specific. Film's "physical shock effect" (Benjamin 1968c, 238) is its potential to disrupt the commonsense pat terns of sense experience, ^ making room for new cultural organizations of perception. Cinema ^ can be the site of ne w configurations of sense knowledge, produced © in (or in spite of) the encounter between different cultures. o The cinema of cultural displacement often focuses on loss: of Ian0 guage, of custom, of one's place in a community. However, a dis£. course of loss alone cannot explain the transformations and ne w productions of cu lture and consciousness that occur in diaspora.
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These chapters have moved from discourses of loss and unknowability to new conditions of knowledge: a shift that reflects the move in intercultural cinema in the last ten years or so from works of protest to works of synthesis, from excavation to transformation. When language cannot record memories, we often look to images. When images fail to revive memory, we may look to the well-kept secrets of objects. Unpacking the secrets encoded in images and ob jects, we find the memory of the senses. This final chapter explores the representation of sense knowledge in intercultural contexts. Yet the films and videos I examine here must still deal with loss, for when the memory of the senses fails—when there are no people who can awaken the knowledge of an object in their own bodies— the loss itself becomes an element of public culture (Seremetakis 1994, 8). Intercultural artists cannot simply recreate the sensory ex perience of their individual or cultural past. Instead, intercultural cinema bears witness to the reorganization of the senses that takes place, and the n ew kinds of sense knowledges that b ecome possible, when people move between cultures. In this final chapter, then, I will argue that the senses are a source of social knowledge. This will require an excursion into the psychol ogy and neurophysiology of sense memory, in which I focus on the sense of smell. I will point out that the organization of the senses, that is, the sensorium, varies culturally as well as individually; thus we would expect cinema to represent the sensorial organization of a given culture. Often the sensorium is the only place where cul tural memories are preserved. For intercultural cinema, therefore, sense experience is at the heart of cultural memory. All this evi dence of the rich cultivation of sense experience is only useful for understanding cinema if we can understand the cinematic experi-
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ence to be multisensory: I will argue that it is, even beyond devices like Odorama, given a viewer's mimetic and synesthetic inclina tions. One would expect that artists would be somewhat suspicious of the cinematic apparatus's ability to represent their precious, and often nonaudiovisual, sensory knowledges: I will look at a number of works, particularly by aboriginal artists, to see how they stretch the apparatus to express these knowledges. A look at Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and related works explores how intercultural artists use the medium to represent the impor tance of sensuous and bodily memories. Of course, with intercultural cinema, there is not only one sensorium at work. Diasporan people inhabit at least two: that of their culture of origin, and the new sensory organization in which they find themselves. Consequently, I will suggest that many intercul tural works are ambivalent about their ability to represent the tra ditional sensory experience; this distinguishes them from the exoticizing films that serve their eager audience the sensuous life of another culture on a platter. The work of Black Audio Film Collective was what first drew my attention to the way cinema calls upon the senses when other sources of history/m emory are inaccessible. I have men tio ned Black Audio's interest in using rituals and evocative tableaux in their styl ized documentaries. Reece Auguiste's Mysteries of July (1991), in particular, evokes t he knowledge of the senses in order to intensify a social protest. The short film begins with the fact that an inordinate number of young Black men in England die in police custody. As do many Black Audio films, it begins where the known facts end, for, not surprisingly, there are no official records of the circumstances of these deaths. The film reconstructs one of the deaths, making it clear that it was the result of the British police's institutionalized racism. But it does not stop here. Auguiste recognizes that the deci sive laying of blame, when there is no legal recourse to convict the killers, cannot heal the pain in the Black community. Instead, Mys teries of July enacts an elaborate ritual of mourning. Candles and incense burn at a memorial altar decorated with flowers and rich satin, which reflects their light in pools of intense color. Mourners walk slowly, in silence, carrying candles. In a scene of grief and rage, these colors, textures, and imagined smells take on an intensity that cannot be expressed verbally or visually.
66. Frame enlargement from Mysteries of July. Courtesy of Black Audio
Film Collective.
Four years after I saw Mysteries ofJuly, I watched a short videotape that seemed to reduce all my ideas about cinema and sense experi ence to a one-liner. Toronto videomaker Steve Reinke's project "The Hundred Videos" (1992-95) is a collection of very short pieces, many of which are exquisite, condensed theses, almost haikus, about the impossibility of representing truth in documentary cinema. One of these tapes consists of a close-up of the lower half of a man's (pale, stubbly) face. He extrudes his tongue and uses it to insert small pieces of canned fruit cocktail into his nostrils, first one, then th e other. Then he does the same with canned peas and carrots. That's all. The tape is called Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Child hood Memories (1993). Part of Reinke's joke is that the banal and slightly disgusting act of putting canned fruit up your nose is supposed to have the power to reach deep levels of the psyche. Part of it is a joke on psychoanalysis: one wishes it could be so easy to recover forgotten memories. But also Reinke raises the issue of how memories are embodied in the senses. Using your tongue to put pieces of canned fruit in your nose calls up on many kinds of sensory awareness: taste; smell; the inimi table feeling of a slimy canned pear sliding up your face from one sensitive membrane to another; the physical dexterity required to
67. Still from Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories. Courtesy of V Tape.
do this. It is a rich multisensory experience that many children and surely a few adults have had. But Reinke is also calling upon a par ticular cultural memory, common to those of us who regularly ate canned fruits and vegetables as children. Not everybody can iden tify with this act. This short tape raises some of the questions I will approach in this chapter: What experiences are so beyond cinematic representation that they require extra-audiovisual mea ns? How does one represent sense memory? Is it a process of narrative identification, of bodily identification? Can the mere audiovisual representation of a gustatorial act successfully arouse lost memories; or, as Reinke's title ("Instructions") suggests, must one physically carry out the act one self? And what are the intercultural limits of such memory: can one identify with sense memories one has never had? In this chapter I continue to explore works that push the visual limits of cinema, and to appeal to the authority of nonvisual percep tion. I argue that in many cultures the sense of sight, while impor tant, is not as paramount as it is in postindustrial metropoli. Thus the antivisual turn often entails an appeal to cultures that cultivate the proximal senses. However, let me caution at the outset that, much as one might like, one cannot put on a sensorium like a suit of clothes and instantly be washed with new sensory perceptions. Sense knowledge is embedded in culture. It is more productive to
look for the latent sensory abilities that already exist within a cul- 199 ture, the tactile, smelly, and gustatory knowledges and pleasures ^ that exist alongside the more "elevated" distance knowledges. Also, ° the seeker of sensation should know that sense knowledge, like any cultural knowledge, is always migrating and transforming. CD Once more, let me point to some of the limits of this extravisual o exploration. Vision is the primary sense in most cultures for good 0 reason. Everybody needs senses that operate over distance, which g. vision and hearing do best. There are interesting exceptions: for ex^ ample, the Umeda people of the New Guinea rainforest use smell as
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a distance sense, for they hunt in dense forests where it is not easy to see or hear one's predators or prey (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 98). My project is not to attempt to overthrow the visual altogether, but to relativize the uses of the senses according to dif ferent cultural organizations of the sensorium. Sense Memory as Social Memory
As I suggested in chapter 1, attempts to reconstruct experience by digging in archives of public and private memory are full of pit falls, since often these experiences are normalized upon interpre tation into film language, rather than remaining destabilizing and "radioactive." How to allow experience to retain its strangeness and urztranslatability? Even the oral history, which is held to be one of the least invasive ways to represent social memory, tends to deter mine the shape of its responses by fitting the interviewee into the framework of dominant history (Connerton 1989). Paul Connerton suggests that these stories may be discovered not in narrative form but in the evidence of ritual, gesture, and other embodied forms of memory. These memories are especially crucial as repositories of knowledge for people whose experience is not represented in the dominant society. The memory of the senses, a nontransparent and differentially available body of information, is important to every body as a source of individual knowledge. For cultural minorities, it is an especially important source of cultural knowledge. The histo ries recorded in the body reveal other patterns than those signaled by elections, the passage of laws, national credit ratings, and other big-ticket signs of shifts in the global sociopolitical sphere. I sug gested in chapter 2 that the intercultural travels of seemingly idio-
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syncratic and "private" objects are often signs of political events that do not register on public scales. Embodied memories and experig ences may well be some of the most important registers of global 53 shifts in power and the emergence of new subjectivities. And as rTj Elaine Scarry points out, the body remains a political witness de"o spite efforts to "reeducate" it. She retells Bruno Bettelheim's story £ from the concentration camps in whi ch a German soldier recog03 nizes a woma n who used to be a dancer and orders her to dance H for him. "She did so, and as she moved into the habitual bodily rhythms and movements from which she had been cut off, she be came reacquainted with the person (herself) from whom she had lost contact; recalling herself in her own mimesis of herself, she re membered who she was, danced up to the officer, moved her hand with grace for his gun, took it, and shot him" (1985, 347; referring to Bettelheim i960). Arthur Jafa (aka A. J. Fielder), cinematographer for Who Needs a Heart? and Daughters of the Dust (among other films), accepts the term "materialist retentionist" to describe his aesthetics: What that means is that I have a belief in certain levels of cultural reten tion. Nam June Paik, the godfather of video art, has this great quote: "The culture that's going to survive in the future is the culture you can carry in your head." The middle passage is such a clear example of this, because you see black American culture particularly developed around those areas we could carry around in our heads—oratorical prowess, dance, music, those kinds of things. (1992, 6g) Of course, Jafa's examples of "culture you can carry in your head" include knowledges that, like dance and music, are also carried in the body. C. Nadia Seremetakis devotes a chapter of The Senses Still (1994) to a peach that was once cultivated in the region of Greece where she grew up. The rodhdkino did not travel well and was not kn own outside of the places it grew. The rise of mass agricultural marketing in Greece, capped by that country's entry into the European Union, made the peach practically disappear from the market. Now, Sere metakis writes, it exists only in the memory of those who used to eat it—"Ah, that peach, what an aroma! and taste! The breast of Aphr o dite we called it. These (peaches and other food) today have no taste
[d-nosta)" (2). These memories rema in embodied in the senses even
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when their stimulus has disappeared. Seremetakis argues that the memory of the senses is itself a cul- _3 tural artifact. Sense memories and material artifacts work in the ® same way; both are emissaries of cultural experience. She describes CD a cultural communion with the sense memories inscribed in objects. o These artifacts are often traveling fetishes, of the sort I described in 0 chapter 2: they might include the Zinacanteca women's tight sash £. CD & that Leslie Devereaux (1995) describes, Shauna Beharry's mother's CD sari in Seeing Is Believing, the distinct smell of carnations for the g Colombian women who grow them in Love, Women, and Flowers, or canned fruit cocktail up the nose for a North American child in Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories. Fetish objects are used to extend bodily experience into memory: Seremetakis's peach, like these other objects, is a prosthesis for memory. Clearly the sense memories Seremetakis describes are not only individual, but shared. Her example underscores the argument that social memory is carried in individual bodies. Many artists and theo rists claim sense experience as a site of "freedom" from cultural constraints—Stan Brakhage's desire to "free the eye" (1963) from cultural constraints, Susan Buck-Morss's (1992) suggestion that the body has a "wild," unalienable core of sense experience. But in fact the senses are also sites of cultural expression. Sense organs are the sites where culture crosses the body. I have emphasized throughout this book that cinema can acti vate inert presences, such as historical archives and fetish objects, and make them volatile so that they intervene in the present. Now I would like to add sense memory to those presences. Seremetakis writes that the Greek etymology of nostalgia is nosto, I retu rn, plus algho, I feel pain (1994, 4). Nostalgia, then, need not mean an im mobilizing longing for a lost past: it can also mean the ability of past experiences to transform the present. Perceptual Plasticity and Intersensory Perception
To understand how the senses encode culture, it is necessary to examine how this process takes place in the body. First we must acknowledge that all the senses may be vehicles of memory, and
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that bodies encode memory in the senses in quite varied ways. As I have noted, Henri Bergson ([1911] 1988) anticipated later research on per ception wh en he emp hasized that the use of the senses is not given but learned. Perception in Bergson's model is plastic; implicitly it is variable according to culture and local need. Thus it provides a way to understand the wide range of possible organizations of sense memory. Some perceptions are more immediate: smell, taste, and touch usually fall into this category. Other perceptions provide more room to maneuver, a "zone of indetermination" (32) in which memory may intervene. However, these distinctions are merely quantitative. All sense perceptions allow for, and indeed require, the mediation of memory. We are "wired" for great variation in the way we use our senses. Our sensorimotor cortex, or the outer layer of the brain where most sensory information is processed, is a map of our sensuous relation ship to the world (Finkel 1992, 399). Everybody's cortex is config ured differently, since sense perception, like other mental capaci ties, is reinforced on the basis of use and must be reinforced by continuous practice. Cooks have stronger synaptic connections be tween the sensorimotor cortex and tongue and nasal receptors than the average person. Violinists are found to have a larger cortical representation of the fingers of the left hand than are (presumably right-handed) nonstring players (Elbert et al. 1995, 305). Other sense capacities tend to adjust accordingly: one would not expect a cook to have an extremely discriminating sense of hearing, for example. The cooperation among the senses is especially evident in the many studies of perception that show that one sense modality can learn to respond to information normally headed for another modality. Con sider the acute hearing of blind people. When I used to rent movies with two blind friends (one congenitally, the other from later in life), their aural perceptiveness astonished me. In the movie a door would open and a new character step into the room; Chris would say, "That's the bad guy," and a couple of scenes later I would find that he was right. Blindness made my friends exquisite aural semioticians. In cognitive science there is growing interest in the idea that the mind, not the environment, is the source of representation. This need not be a solipsistic argument if we understand the mind itself to be formed thr ough experience. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thomp son, and Eleanor Rosch (1991) argue that the meanings of sense ex-
perience are not given by the world but lear ned through embodied 203 action, through the complex interaction of cultural and bodily pro cesses. Our perception of color categories, for example, is not a ^ reaction to wavelength and intensity of light, nor is it wholly sub° jective: they argue that it is both based on appar en tly physiological CD R
universals and culturally specific (168-71). This would suggest that while there may be physiological bases for everybody's agreement
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sentation of this information. One culture may not have a wor d for
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that exemplary red; people in another culture may be oblivious to the noxious smell. The implications of this research for intercultural experience are several. First, our sensorium is formed by culture: it pro duces a map of the "objective" world that reflects our cultural configuration of the senses. Second, our sensorium creates the world "subjectively" for us. Thus, one would expect that in an ocularcentric culture, people will experience and produce the world as a primarily visual world. And a person whose sensorium reflects the cultural importance of smell will produce a world in which smell matters. Third, given the plasticity of ne ural networks, it is possible to learn a new configura tion of the senses—although learning the memories that accompany it is another matter. The Nose Knows I want to focus on the sense of smell to pursue my argument that the sensorium is malleable, that the sense modalities work in con cert, and that all sense experience is informed by culture. Foreign cultures tend to be both vilified and exoticized in terms of smell. It appears to be universal, and is certainly understandable, that every culture prefers its own world of smells to any other (Classen 1993, 79-80): as Freud said, our own shit never stinks. But the association of smell with primitivism has served the ends of cultural imperial ism, in the nam e of civilizing and controlling the perceived odorous excesses of other cultures. Hence my concern to "abase" vision and "elevate" smell, by showing that the one is embodied and intimate, the other cognitive and cultivated. By pulling at these two ends of the sensory hierarchy, I hope to realign all the sensory modalities
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that lie "between" th em in value, in order to reconfigure this hier archy from a scale of values to a wiggle of intensities. g Everyone agrees that learning is verbal, and correspondingly that f£ wor ds are a me di um of knowledge. Most will agree that vision can rd be edu cated as well; hence the ter m "visual literacy" (which reduces "o the visual to the symbolic). But the senses of hearing (exclusive of 22 the verbal), taste, touch, and smell are less often accepted as senses © that can be educated, that is, as sources of knowledge. Yet I would H argue that olfaction, like the other senses, may be cultivated; ther e fore the sense of smell can be a source of cultural knowledge. 1 If this case can be made for the lowly sense of smell, then it must be ac cepted that other senses are knowledgeable as well. First we must ask, do hum an smell preferences have some genetic core or are they entirely learned? It is a common argument that we have an innate, that is, genetic, attraction to odors associated with sexuality, and an innate aversion to odors of danger and death (for example, Stoddart 1990). The latter might explain why, especially in dualistic cultures, smell has been considered a primitive and dan gerously sensual sense. This primitivism might also be explained by Freud's hypothesis that the sense of smell is repressed both phylogenetically and ontogenetically: the first, when humans adopted upright carriage and distanced themselves from their smelly anogenital areas; the second, when a child yields to socialization and abandons its pleasure in its own feces (Freud 1985, 279). Humans' famous phylogenetic standing-up may well explain the repression of sensory awareness of sexual and other bodily odors. Now, when we use perfumes, we layer culture onto smell's bio logical substrate, sublimating sexual odors into these more sym bolic scents, olfactory signs for sexuality. Nevertheless, despite this mimicking of biology by culture, I would argue that Freud collapsed the cultural aspects of smell onto the genetic. Sexual sublimation does not explain the complexity with which smell is deployed in different cultures, for example. The proximal senses of touch, smell, and taste are more central to the experience of most nonhuman creatures, be they chimpanzees or paramecia, than they are to humans. These senses are also more important in the early years of human infancy and childhood: in fants can identify their mothers and other important people through smell before they recognize them visually (Engen 1991, 63). The dis-
tance senses of vision and hearing are more developed in higher 205 animals, and they also develop with human maturity. All this would seem to support the assump tion that the "close" senses are primi^ tive both in the life of the species and in the life of the individual, ^ and that the distance senses are the most "evolved" in both impli- CD o cations of the w o r d . H e n ce , I believe, t h e u n w i l l i n g n e s s of m a n y cultural theorists to br oa ch the se to pi cs, from fear of b e i n g a c c u s e d ^ »-b of primitivism a n d essentialism. Yet it is wo rt h ven tur ing further to CD & test these assumptions. CD While most creatures have strong genetic codings for the smells g of sex, food, danger, and death, for the most part it appears that humans do not (Hines 1997, 79). Instead we are genetically wired to learn strong but contextual responses to smells. Centers in the brain for processing different kinds of sensory information develop at different points in the growth of the fetus and infant. Cognition takes place in the cortex, the youngest and most evolved part of the brain (Stoddart 1990, 34). The hypothalamus, which is noncognitive, is the oldest part of the brain both phylogenetically and ontogenetically: it was once referred to as the rhinencephalon, or "smell brain." This and other parts of the limbic system (notably the amyg dala) deal with memory and emotion. Olfaction is the only sense perception whose neural pathway leads directly to the hypothala mus: this means that olfaction alone has a fundamentally noncognitive component. 2 Yet simultaneously another neural pathway leads from the nose (strictly speaking, the olfactory bulb) to the cortex. This means that smell is processed cognitively at the same time that it awakens deep-seated, precognitive memories. Memories of smell endure much longer, even after a single exposure to an odor, than visual or auditory memories. Yet smell is difficult to verbalize and visualize (Schab 1991, 243). Smells are easier to identify through personal memory associations than by name (and Schab's article invests these associations with nostalgia: "grandma's kitchen" vs. "floor wax"; "the tobacco grandfather used to smoke" vs. "Prince Albert tobacco" [245, 246]). We respond emotionally to a smell first, and then we name it: asphalt, magnolia, grandma's kitchen. Since we process smell both cognitively and precognitively, we learn emo tional responses to smell. We learn to love our mothers' smell, be it sweat or perfume (Engen 1991, 63-74), to identify the smell of home, be it fish sauce or mildew, and to build new associations
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with the ne w smell environments we come across. Margaret Morse writes most evocatively of the associations of smell with hom e, even wh en sense memories are aroused by completely different stimuli, as wh en the sea near Athens—"fresh like watermelon, wit h funky undertones"—takes her back years to a duck pond in Ohio (1999,66). All this suggests that, despite the "deepness" of smell centers in the brain, smell preferences and abilities can be developed in an individual lifetime. The nose, then, is not merely a gonadal gondola. The sense of smell is cultivated far beyond its "animal" associations. Given the malleability of human sensory capacities, it seems nec essary to recognize the cultural dimension of smell. Where more symbolic languages tend to strip private memory away, the proxi mal senses are where memory remains in the body. 3 The Cultural Sensorium
Not only cooks, musicians, and blind people develop specialized configurations of their sensoria. More profoundly, studies of the sensorium suggest great cultural differences in the way the nervous system organizes th e senses. As Walter Ong first pointed out, a given culture will teach us to specialize our sensorium in particular ways by paying more attention to some types of per cep tio n than others. "Given sufficient knowledge of the sensorium exploited within a specific culture, one could probably define the culture as a whole in virtually all its aspects" (Ong [1967] 1991, 28). Since Ong wrote this, a number of anthropologists have begun to devote themselves to describing different cultures according to their organization of the sensorium. 4 This is a fascinating body of work that only begins to suggest the great variation in the uses of perception of which the body is capable, and the survival, customary, ritual, aesthetic, and other purposes that inform human sensoria. It also raises method ological questions: for example, is the sensorium best described by long-standing ritual practices, or by informal, everyday practices? I will draw on some of these anthropologists' findings below, as I did in the previous chapter, to show how cultures use the senses as sources of information and underst and ing in extremely different ways, and how these different sensoria can be translated into, and translate, cinematic languages. This recent interest in cultural difference at the level of the sen-
sorium is spu rred by many anthropologists' and cultural theorists' 207 perception of an atrophy of sensuous knowledge in Western postindustrial societies. This anxiety echoes the concern among neo^ Marxists that I discussed in the last chapter. Often these critics argue ® that "we in the West" need to relearn how to inhabit our bodies, ap- CD pealing to the embodied knowledges of non-Western cultures. Such o arguments imply a kind of primitivist longing for another culture's 0 sense knowledge; hen ce one must examine them critically. g. Predating by decades the recent comparative cultural mappings c/> CD
of the sensorium, Marcel Mauss's "Techniques of the Body" ([1934]
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1992) proposed an ethnology of bodily "techniques," namely, actions that are "effective and traditional," that differ according to culture, age, gender, work, and other variables. He stressed that all these techniques were learned from authority figures such as elders (as Connerton describes how social bodily memories are transmitted from old to young). Mauss fondly described non-European cultures' ability to preserve the children's posture of the squat: The child normally squats. We no longer know how to. I believe that this is an absurdity and an inferiority of our races, civilizations, societies. An ex ample: I lived at the front with Australians (whites). They had one consider able advantage over me. When we made a stop in mud or water, they could sit down on their heels to rest, and the "flotte" as it was called, stayed below their heels. I was forced to stay standing up in my boots with my whole foot in the water. The squatting position is, I believe, an interesting one that could be preserved in a child. It is a very stupid mistake to take it away from him. All mankind, excepting only our societies, has preserved it. (463) Mauss's envious account of Australians' bodily conventions (and of course squatting is a posture also cultivated in Asian countries) reflects a fear that the body's functions would atrophy under the pressures of industrialized society and outmoded European propri eties. He seemed to have faith that the learning of bodily techniques is a simple matter, a change that could be effected in one generation. This is perhaps a more difficult sort of change to effect than Mauss hoped, given that bodies learn easily but cultural norms change much more slowly. Following in Mauss's footsteps, the work of anthropologists such as C. Nadia Seremetakis, Constance Classen, E. Valentine Daniel, David Howes, and Paul Stoller are full of examples of experiences
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that appeal to many senses and to embodied aesthetic, social, or ritual experience. Howes deplores the separation of the senses and g overvalorization of the visual in Western societies in a way that is gj partly accurate and partly romantic. For example, he compares two iij images: one is a Diirer engraving of an artist looking through an *o Albertian pespectival grid in order to make a drawing of a woman; ^ the other is an abstract-looking design used by shamans of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians of eastern Peru. The former image translates 0 E-1 all experience into the visual, while the latter embodies many forms of sensory experience: the designs are said to embody songs sung by the sham an , wh ich, "on coming into contact with the p at i en t, ... once again turn into designs which penetrate the body and heal the patient's illness" (Howes 1991b, 5). The Shipibo-Conibo visual image, then, is only one aspect of a multisensory experience involv ing sound, touch, and fragrance, whose function is mimetic rather than representational, while the Albertian grid translates visual data into visual representation. Examinations of a particular cultural organization of the senses are valuable, but implicit comparisons with the sensory devaluation of a monolithic "West" are counterproductive. When Howes sug gests that the dissociation of the senses in the West is why "there is nothing healing about most Western contemporary art" (6), he merely displays his ignorance about art. Healing does imply a close ness to the body, while vision is the sense that permits the greatest distance between the body and the object. Yet, as I have argued throughout these chapters, there are many examples of more or less Western art that offer healing precisely in their appeal to the senses as a whole. Mauss's and Howes's longing for a more well-rounded sensorium resonates with Marxist critiques of the alienation of the senses, and with the disaffection with the visual that I discussed in the previous chapter. Yet they make the primitivist and exoticizing mistake of ascribing the fullness of sensory experience only to "non-Western" cultures (and to children). It is a mistake to believe that only some people have sense experience, and that only some objects have sensory histories. Also, especially given the cosmopoli tan mixing of cultures in most societies, it is important to acknowl edge that people's individual sensoria overlap only unevenly with their cultural sensoria. This may amount to a difference between the sensorium, or the individual's sensory wiring which is informed by
culture, and the sensuous geography, or the wor ld of sensuous ex- 209 perience in a given place. Even in an ocularcentric cu lture, there are always differences in the ways people engage sensuously with even ^ the most visual of objects. Thus, while taking different sensoria into ® account, I want to avoid totalizing descriptions of given cultur es' CD sensuous engagement with the world. o While Mauss envied the half-sitting posture, artist Simon Leung 0 notes that diasporan Asians are ambivalent about the squat. While fr ^ Vietnamese refugees squat unselfconsciously to wait for the bus in San Jose, assimilated Asians like Leung have unlearned the habit
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of squatting. "An assimilated immigrant child's observation of the squatting everyday shifted into something remarkable in the vio lent process of dis-identification with newly-foreign bodies, which to others' (i.e., Americans') eyes probably resembled his own" (1995, 94). Leung points out that intercultural experience is violent at the level of the body, for the recent immigrant must choose whether to keep his or her bodily habits, at the cost of being considered primi tive or exotic, or to shed them, at the cost of shedding the memory these habits encode. This hard (and not necessarily conscious) de cision underlies the ambivalence toward sensory traditions charac teristic of mu ch inter cultural cinema. A controversial film that explicitly examines different cultural styles of embodiment is Ngozi Onwurah's And Still I Rise (1995). Onwurah invites a number of African diaspora women to confront the stereotype that Black women are more physical, more sensual than whites. Rather than demur that there is no difference, most of her interlocutors take pride in Black female embodiment. We see Black women of all ages exemplifying the words of the poem by Audre Lorde that the film takes for its title, "I walk as though I have diamonds between my thighs": they wear sexy outfits, walk together, laugh together, and dance at a street party. Their pro ud emb odi men t is contrasted with the shoals of white commuters wearing suits that efface their bodies and their individuality. This is Onwurah's stra tegic move to reclaim the Black female body from the legacy of enslavement, dramatized in the film by scenes of an African woman who is captured as a slave and raped by her white owner. The writers, artists, and activists she interviews do more than reclaim a cultural tradition of embodiment, however. At least one, writer Buchi Echehmeta, states that people of the diaspora have genetic links to the Afri-
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can continent, and that Black people's physical expressiveness is not a learned form of embodiment but an expression of the genes. This controversial claim places Echehmeta at one pole of a continuum of African diaspora women who take pride in their physicality and ar gue that it makes them fundamentally different from the Europeans who have learned to separate mind and soul from body. Multisensory Cinema and the Mimetic Apparatus
It would seem that smell can have no part in the audiovisual image, and cinema studies has, for the most part, understandably dismissed it. Christian Metz ([1975] 1982) maintained that cinema reproduces
the aesthetic hierarchy between the distance senses of vision and 211 hearing and the proximal senses, such as touch, taste, and smell. "It ^ is no accident that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a distance, and that those which depend on the senses ® of contact are often regarded as 'minor' arts" such as cuisine and CD perfumery (59-60). Yet th e less acceptable senses can also b e culti- o vated aesthetically. 0 How can the audiovisual media of film and video represent non- g: audiovisual experience? There are no technologies that reproduce co the experiences of touch, smell, taste, and movement. There are
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technologies that attempt to simulate the effects of these experiences, such as virtual reality's audiovisual synthesis of movement or IMAX movies, whose disorienting audiovisual cues induce vertigo in viewers. But there is no way to mechanically reproduce the smell of a peach, the texture of concrete, or the feeling of falling off a cliff.5 How, then, does cinema mediate the place of the body in cultur e, and of culture in the body? To answer, let me begin by noting that the embodied viewing experience discuss ed in the previous chapter extends to the physical and social spaces of the viewing environ ment. We take in many kinds of "extradiegetic" sensory information, information from outside the film's world, w he n we "watch" a film. Compare the experience of a few people watching a video on a sixfoot home video screen; a lot of people gathered around a small TV to watch a bootleg import tape; the talking, picnicking audiences at Chinese theaters; the Friday night action movie packed with libidi nous young couples; viewers huddling for warmth in nonprofit art spaces to squint at 16mm film. These examples should begin to sug gest the wide range of ways spectators hip is "embodied." Especially at a public movie theater, sensory information of all sorts abounds. We are aware of the movement and warmth of the other people in the theater, as well as their whispered or shouted comments on the activity on screen or elsewhere. Smells of pop corn and all sorts of other food, perfume, cigarette smoke (in th e old days), body odor, cleaning products, or mildew from musty theater seats: any of these may address the sense of smell so insistently that it is hard to pay attention to the audiovisual image on screen. And of course these extra dimensions to the audiovisual experience dif fer greatly in different neighborhoods, and not in predictable ways. For example, while bringing a family picnic to the movies is tradi-
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212 tional in Chinese and Indian cultures, in big North American cities it is also becoming common for nine-to-fivers to eat takeout meals g at the movies after work, inciting complaining letters to newspapers j£ about crackling aluminum foil, odors, and spilled food. Home video jg viewing, too, has its own individual and collective sensory rituals. "o In short, the cinema viewing experience, taken as a whole, is already 3 multisensory. o A number of filmmakers have directly introduced smell to the H cinematic experience. D. W. Griffith had incense burnt during screenings of Intolerance (1916), as Marcel Pagnol did for the pre miere of Angele (1934). John Waters's infamous Odorama gimmick in Polyester (1982) coordinated the smells of roses, farts, gaso line, and so forth, corresponding to the activity on screen, with scratch-n-sniff cards. Experimental filmmakers Yervant Ghiankian and Angela Ricci Lucci diffuse subtle scents into the room in the course of screenings of their films. A number of North American theaters have organized screening series of famous food movies, including Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1986), Like Water for Chocolate (Alfonso Arau, 1992), Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987), and Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994), which are followed by recre ations of the meals in the films at local restaurants. Such extradiegetic sense experience amplifies the multisensory appeal of a movie, but it is not essential to it. Indeed, actual smells can supplant the mediated experience of the audiovisual image with a much more immediate response. When Pagnol diffused scents in the movie theatre at the premiere of Angele, there was a public panic.6 Associations with actual smells are so haphazard and indi vidual that even the commonest odors incite reactions from relax ation to arousal, disgust, or horror. The experience of viewing a film is multisensory, then, not be cause of actual odors in the theater, but because the sense percep tions work in concert. Movies themselves only appeal to sound and hearing, the sense modalities most accessible to symbolization and verbalization. However, Deleuze fans will note that the cinema will necessarily offer a multisensory image to the viewer, since Bergson's model of perception, upon which Deleuze relies, is multi sensory. Deleuze's optical image is one that requires the viewer to complete the image by searching his or her own circuits of sense
memory. Thus the audiovisual image necessarily evokes other sense memories. Certainly, the simplest way for movement-image cinema to appeal
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to the viewer's senses is throug h narrative identification. Characters ® are shown eating, making love, and so forth, and we viewers iden- © tify with their activity. We salivate or become aroused on verbal and o visual cue. Beyond this, it is common for cinema to evoke sense ^ experience through intersensory links: sou nds may evoke textures; gf. sights may evoke smells (rising steam or smoke evokes smells of &> CD
fire, incense, or cooking). These intersensory links are well termed synesthetic.
Synesthesia is the perception of one sensation by another mo dality, such as the ability to distinguish colors by feel. Artists have written provocatively of the synesthetic experience of colors. For Wassily Kandinsky, yellow calls to mind the unbearably sharp sounds of a trumpet's rising notes, and is more odoriferous than violet ([1938] 1968, 347-48). Derek Jarman wrote Chroma when he was losing his sight due to AIDS, which makes his vivid associations with colors, informed by the painter's love for precious pigments, all the more powerful. Mad Vincent sits on his yellow chair clasping his knees to his chest—ba nanas. The sunflowers wilt in the empty pot, bone dry, skeletal, the black seeds picked into the staring face of a halloween pumpkin. Lemonbelly sits swigging sugar-stick Lucozade from a bottle, fevered eyes glare at the jaundiced corn, caw of the jet-black crows spiralling in the yellow. The lemon goblin stares from the unwanted canvasses thrown in a corner. Sour puss suicide screams with evil—clasping cowardly Yellowbelly, slit-eyed. U994, 90) Clearly, colors have rich sensory associations. How much these are cross-cultural is a different question. Yellow, in the complex color-olfactory cosmology of the Desana people of the Colombian Amazon, is associated with male procreative power and with the "merry" melody of a flute played by Desana men (Classen 1993, i^ 1 " 33). Yet in all these examples, a single color has multiple sensory associations and varying degrees of symbolic codification. Color is bu t one example of the ways our experience is always syn esthetic, always a mingling of our senses with one another and of our
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selves with the world. In the previous chapter I dwelt on how per ception is embodied and inextricable from memory. When I smell a magnolia, I do not distinguish as separate perceptions the act of bending to meet it, its waxy pink-and-whiteness, its unmistakable yet indefinable fragrance, the cool touch of petals on my face, and the wave of associations from my memory. Our experience of the world is fundamentally mimetic, a completing of the self in a sen sory meeting with the world. Smelling the magnolia, I mingle with it sensuously; I take on some of its qualities. Watching a bird eat a berry, or a novice cyclist teeter and fall, the sympathetic ecologist David Abram describes how he tastes the acidic burst in his own mouth, feels the impact of the asphalt against the side of his body (1996,126). This sensuous meeting with the world is not merely an act of identification, but a function of the interplay of the senses. As Benjamin and Merleau-Ponty argued in different contexts, a mimetic and synesthetic relationship to the world underlies lan guage and other sign systems. Once that relationship is mediated thro ugh an image, multisensory experience is condensed into visual form. It does not vanish but is translated into the image. Thus it is not necessary to think that literate and audiovisual (as opposed to oral) cultures are fundamentally alienated from our material world. Abram argues that "many Westerners become conscious of this over lapping of the senses only when their allegiance to the presumably impartial, analytic logic of their culture temporarily breaks down," as when on drugs (1996, 61). Again, rather than blast "Western" sensory alienation, I would suggest that the mimetic traces of the world are harder to recognize in the demanding systems of signs that constitute the technological world, but they are still at work in our understanding of it. We are constantly recreating the world in our bodies, even as our representational systems become more abstract. Even when language is mediated through printed words, an invocatory trace of speech and its mimetic relationship to the world remains. Cinema, by virtue of its richer and muddier semiotic relationship to the world, is all the more an agent of mimesis and synesthesis than writing is. It has long been held that part of the magic of cinema is that some of its meaning evades codification. In fact, cinema is a mimetic medium, capable of drawing us into sensory participation with its world even more than is written lan guage. Images are fetishes, which the reader can translate—more or
less, depending on how her own experience is embodied—into sen- 215 suous experience.
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Rather than assume that technology alienates people from their sensuous being, intercultural filmmakers stretch the app aratus to accommodate their own sensuous and mimetic relationship to the world. Any representational technology can be more or less sym bolic or mimetic, but I believe that in our uneven global emergence from literate to audiovisual cultures (see McLuhan 1962), we may be witnessing a gradual re turn to more mimetic technologies: technolo gies that call upon, or attempt to recreate, our pre-existing sensuous
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relationship to the world. Intercultural films and videos do show ambivalence toward representational technologies, including the very media in which they are produced. I believe this ambivalence is a testing of technologies that reduce experience to the visible and quantifiable, be they writing, photography, or cinema, for their mi metic capacities. Experimental filmmakers have been exploring the relationships between perception and embodimen t for years, offering a mimetic alternative to the mainstream narrativization of experience. How ever, the use of the apparatus in order to represent embodied cultur e is relatively recent. 8 Teshome Gabriel (1988), for example, suggests that Western filmic conventions are inadequate to the embodied time and space of "nomadic" experience, arguing that time and space are physically experienced, rather than abstractions, in nomadic ex perience. "[In nomadic orientations,] the conception of space is . . . relative to seeing, feeling, and touching" (66). Arthur Jafa sharpens Gabriel's speculations into detailed suggestions for how the cine matic apparatus might reflect the cultural sensorium. He suggests, for example, that the hand-crank camera would be a good tool for expressing African diasporic sensibilities: it is "a more appropriate instrument with which to create movement that replicates the ten dency in Black music to 'worry the note'—to treat not es as indetermi nate, inherently unstable sonic frequencies rather than the standard Western treatment of notes as fixed phenomena" (1992, 70). As cinematographer, he experiments with using the apparatus mimetically in Daughters of the Dust (1992), wh en he uses a high-speed camera in order to portray certain scenes, and in his recent short film, Slowly, This (1995). Slowly, This follows a conversation in a bar between an Asian and an African American man about racism, anger, and
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self-image. Reflecting Jafa's comments on the problems of lighting people of color with an apparatus designed to show off white people, g the good-looking people in the bar are each lit to bring out their '£ individual skin tones. During the conversation the camera lingers £ on small things—beads of moisture on a glass or a hand gesturing "o wit h a cigarette—as though to convey the men's characters through 22 the atm osphe re and objects that surr ound them. Jafa avoids an ana03 logical relationship to time, instead using slow motion and freeze H frames, in an attempt to evoke the intensity of embodied experience. Philip Mallory Jones more radically intervenes in the video appa ratus's capacity to represent what he calls the "African sensorium" (Zippay 1991, 121). His multimedia work in progress First World Order uses electronic media to find (or create) common elements of culture and aesthetic among African peoples in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Islands ("Festival News" 1995, 31). Using digital morphing, Jones literally stretches the medium in order to show these commonalities, for example transforming an Egyptian sphinx into a Carribean woman playing a drum. I find morphing a rather rhetorical way of demonstrating the relationships between African diasporic cultures, but Jones's conviction that this technique is superior to a narrative account of relationships among cultures is nevertheless provocative. 9 Gabriel's characterization of nomadic aesthetics is a bit essentialist, but it does usefully describe ways that film- and videomakers use cinema to express a specific cultural sensorium. They capture some qualities of Igloolik Isuma Productions's videos, which recre ate the nomadic lives of the artists' forebears. (The company consists of Zacharias Kunuk, Paulossie Quilitalik, Norman Cohn, and Paul Apak.) Qaggig (1989), Nunaqpa (1991) and Saputi (1994) have been mistaken for ethnographies, but in fact they are historical dramas about the Inuit communi ty of Igloolik as it was fifty and one hu ndre d years ago. In these works, true to Gabriel's characterization of "Third Aesthetics" (1989), the stories are not carried by individuals but by the activity of the group. The habitat of snow and tundra is as mu ch a character in Igloolik Isuma tapes as the actors are, in long shots and pans th at depict the people as a group and embedded in their land scape. In Saputi and "Avamuktalik" (an episode of Igloolik Isuma's television series, Nunavut, 1995), some magical or dreamlike events occur as well, as when a young boy is spooked by a spirit who lingers
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70. Still from Qaggig. Photo: Zacharias Kunuk. Courtesy of V Tape.
71. Still from Saputi. Courtesy of V Tape.
in front of him for a moment (with electronically distorted singing on the sound track) and then vanishes. For those familiar with this collective space, magical occurrences convey a sense of the fullness of the apparently deserted landscape. Also implicit is a fullness of sensory experience: awareness of the temperature and dryness of the air, for example; a keen sense of the distance vision and hearing necessary for hunting on vast treeless areas; the pleasure of warmth and food. The screen of vast landscape and quiet real-time activity may look sparse to outsider s, but is full of implicit presence.
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Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva Jr. (1995) critically assesses the difference between traditional, embodied knowledges and new, g technologically med iated knowledges, including the cinema. MasaE yesva describes the ways indigenous peoples have constructed and Jj inhabited space on the North American continent, inhabited the "o time of the seasons, and experienced sacred spaces. Like Gabriel, he 3 asks what aspects of indigenous people's cultural experience might © be approx imated by cinema. Masayesva posits a Native American H cinematic aesthetic that wou ld speak directly to Native viewers. For example, it might introduce alternatives to cuts; the use of special optical effects; the use of 360 0 pans, dolly shots, and so on, not to draw attention to the facility of the cinematographer but to tell a story; editing in order to express "the rhythms of a unique order" rather th an cliched transitional shots; and of course the use of Native languages. Masayesva has mad e a nu mb er of works that turn on the differ ence between Hopi people's knowledge of their culture and out siders' knowledge, often expressed in terms of the Hopi sensuous geography. Meaning is embedded in the places, people, and ob jects of Hopi life in ways that will be opaque to others. Chapter 3 showed how Masayesva uses haptic images to give a sense of re lationship to place. His Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms (1991) shows the difference between visually analyzing an object from outside and knowing it in lived, embodied experience. The tape is about a Hopi schoolgirl whose grandmother forbids her to join a class field trip to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Instead she stays home to learn how to make pots. While Smithsonian experts show the schoolchildren how they use high-tech methods to study and classify ancient fragments of Hopi ceramics found at the burial site called Siskyavi, the old woman teaches her granddaughter to dig clay, form pots, paint them, and use them in the baby-naming cere mony (she also makes pots to sell to tourists). The history of the clan as told by the grandmother is illustrated by ceramic paintings that seem to come to life as her voice populates them with interclan intrigues. By contrast, Smithsonian curators use electron micros copy, X-ray diffractometer, and neutr on activation analysis to date and locate the pottery samples that the young people have brought from Siskyavi. The sincerity of the Smithsonian scientists and con servationists, their obvious love of their object of study, their enthu-
72. Production still from Siskyavi. Courtesy of
Victor Masayesva Jr.
siasm in working with the Hopi children, and their concern to find the best pots "to be included in the film" make it clear that they are not simply antagonists. In one way Siskyavi witnesses the dying of traditional cultu re, through the loss of people who can awaken the knowledge of cul tural objects in their own sensory engagement. The grandmother is depressed to hear how the museum uses Hopi pottery. A Hopi student writes a report based on the museum trip, employing the past tense to describe her people as though they were vanished. Yet Masayesva suggests that the battery of technological and hermeneutic approaches the museum experts apply to the Hopi pots cannot penetrate the Hopi culture. The dialogue in the grandmother's home is only partly translated, emphasizing that cultural knowledge can only come from daily life. Shots of plants, flowers, and insects on the land around the house give a hint of the life that infuses t he pots, a life that is tactile and olfactory as much as visual. By animating the figures on the Smithsonian pots, Masayesva gives a sense that there are spiritual presences witnessing or partaking in human activi ties: the animations liberate the paint ed creatures, hands, and spiral paths to metam orphose into other forms. Beautiful vessels spiral like constellations through the dreams of the girl who stayed home. Ultimately Siskyavi suggests that visual and instrumental repres en tations cannot "touch" Hopi culture, but that Masayesva can use the
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apparatus to engender a mimetic, embodied representation of his culture. g A mor e corrosive critique of the difference between First Nations £ people's traditional way of embodying culture and imported techij nologies (in this case writing) is And the Word Was God (1987) by "o Ruby Truly. As it begins, a Native wo man sits naked in an office ^ reading a "found poem": a guide from 1954, part grammar lesson © and part sermon, used by missionaries working among Cree people H in norther n Saskatchewan. She violently intones the crisp English words. "I see you. I hit you. I shoot you. I fetch you. You see men. You are shooting m e n . . . . They are lost in sin." During this depress ing litany, her voice is accompanied by bleak shots of the office and the reservation. Yet the images gradually change, to loving shots of a river through trees and close-ups at the edge of the water, as the lesson changes to a dialogue about fishing. "He accompanies him. It is beside our home," the woman reads gently. . . . And the Word Was God shows that the Church did terrible damage to the Native people but did not break their connection to the land, wher e lan guage gives way to a deeper knowledge of the familiar and beloved landscape. The videomakers of Igloolik Isuma Productions critically test the new technologies for their capacity to express an Inuit sense of time, place, and community. In the last episode of Nunavut, called "Happy Day," the Igloolik community celebrates the newly incorpo rated holiday of Christmas. The people's attitudes toward the holi day, as toward the white priest who shows up in earlier episodes, seem to range from enthusiasm to suspicion. The camera also seems to view the innovation dubiously, since this last episode is the only one shot in black and white. One of the grandmas wakes every mem ber of the household with a handshake, saying "Christmas" (pro nounced "Karishimase") while others reluctantly and sleepily join in. The group takes up Inuktitut hymnbooks and begins a mournfulsounding rendition of "Oh Come All Ye Faithful." Usually in Igloo lik Isuma videos, the cinematography complements the feeling of shared and social space: the camera seems to be a participant in groups of people, moving and changing focus gently in order to in clude everybody over the duration of a shot. In the hymn scene, however, the camera pans along the singers, lined up as though
in church, stiff and uncomfortable. (Their hymn-singing is by no means as lustily embodied as it is among some congregations to the south.) Things begin to look up wh en the ban nock is ready to eat, a wom an takes up the accordion and begins to play, and the me n of each househo ld exchange gifts. With gusto, some of the men and wom en take turns drumming and singing traditional songs. As in Qaggig, the camera swings around the performers as though dancing with them, quite differently from its hands-off relationship to the hymn. The episode concludes with a lively square dance, shot from a low angle to cap ture as much activity as possible in the tight
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space: people debate the steps, and someone instructs "Say yeehoo!" With some ambivalence, "Happy Day" shows that the Inuit of 1946 could incorporate new ways—white ways—selectively, with out destroying traditional culture; and that the ways that will make it into tradition are those that make it into the body. Such works critically compare traditional, embodied knowledges with technologies that abstract knowledge from the body, be they writing (and the Christian teaching it enables) or electron micros copy. None completely condemn s the technological and inst rumen tal (and visual) methods. With a little encouragement, these artists show, the new technologies of film and video can indeed take part in a mimetic and bodily relationship to the world. I mentioned in the last chapter that the recent interest in using the mediu m mimetically harkens back to the early days of cinematic practice and theory. Early film theorists were aware of cinema's capacity to collapse the gap between the distance and proximal senses. Sergei Eisenstein noted that "in our new perspective—there is no perspective" (1970, 97; quoting Rene Guillere), as Benjamin re marked upon cinema's ability to satisfy the masses' desire to "bring things closer" (1968c). Eisenstein's writings on the synchronization of the senses, though mostly devoted to relationships between the visual and sound image, acknowledge the synesthetic quality of any single sense perception, as when he quotes Lafcadio Hearn: . . . Because [people] are insensible to the phosphorescing of words, the fragrance of words, the noisesomeness of words, the tenderness or hard ness, the dryness or juiciness of words,—the interchange of values in the gold, the silver, the brass and the copper of words: —
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Is that any reason why we should not try to make them hear, to make them see, to make them feel? (1970, 92-93)
Eisenstein speculated that Hearn's nearsightedness "sharpened his perceptiveness in these matters." Hearn's poetic plea und erscores the argument that a mimetic form $ of representation underlies language and other sign systems. By ap© pealing to one sense in order to represent the experience of another, H cinema appeals to the integration and commutation of sensory ex perien ce within the body. Each audiovisual image meets a rush of other sensory associations. Audiovisual images call up conscious, unconscious, and nonsymbolic associations with touch, taste, and smell, which themselves are not experienced as separate. Each image is synthesized by a body that does not necessarily divide per ceptions into different sense modalities. All this is evident—to a fault—in the Vietnamese film The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Arm Hung, 1994), whose title states a chal lenge to the audiovisual medium. It is indeed a fragrant film, less because we identify with characters who taste and smell than be cause it makes sound and vision synesthetic. The main character is Mui, a young woman who travels from the country to Saigon to become a servant in a prosperous household. In many scenes, Mui takes pleasure in her sensuous connection to her daily work. When she cuts open one of those papayas, the image and sound, tied to her perspective, convey the slight effort of her knife and the wetness of the translucent seeds under her fingers. Frequent close-ups (with closely miked sound) linger on the papaya leaves dripping with rain, frogs plopping in the small pond, and ants tortu red by the young son of the house, engaging the viewer's recollective imagination of the cool smell of rain and the harsh sizzle of a burning insect. Uncon nected from any character's point of view, the camera seems to drift along currents of odor as it moves smoothly between the intercon nected spaces of the courtyard, where the servant women prepare meals, and the cool dim rooms of the house. Even though the smells and textu res of this place may be unfamil iar to many viewers, the film encourages us to engage with them; viewers who themselves have lived in a Vietnamese house and have prepared and eaten green papayas will have a sensuous experience that is all the richer. Put otherwise, the more one is able to engage
with t he sensuous memories called upon by the film, t h e more its 223 audiovisual medium becomes merely a means of access to an ulti mately synesthetic experience. Tran A h n Hung, who was born i n ^ Vietnam but grew u p in France, h a s said, "The smell of green papaya <*> is for m e a childhood memory of maternal gestures" (Maslin 1994). CD o The film's sensuous intensity thus embodies t h e exile's nostalgia, i n which sense memories are all the more affectively charged than they 0
would be for someone who still smells green papayas every day. I cj wou ld criticize the film because it suggests that Mui, a peasant, has CD
access to sensuous experiences that the urbanites do not: it com-
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pares her to the Westernized, bourgeois fiancee of her employer, and finds her "deeper" and more sensuous than the other woman, who is seen as shallow and frivolous. This is problematic, because it assumes that peasants and "non-Westerners" have a more sensu ous relationship to the world than Westernized, urb an sophisticates do. It thus connects the atrophy of sensory knowledges to (Western) sophistication, as anthropologists such as Ong and Howes do.
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Sense Memory in Daughters of the Dust
Any film or video is capable of calling on the memory of the senses in order to intensify the experience it represents. But in some cases it is more crucial for cultural history to reside in the memory of the senses. This is the case particularly when official histories can not comprehend certain realms of experience, or when they actively deny them. For example, compare Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992) with the recent rash of dramas based on novels by Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. All these fiction films are, effectively, ethnographic reconstructions of cultures that no longer exist, namely, the British aristocracy of the early nineteenth cen tury, the late-nineteenth-century American aristocracy in Europe, and the Manhattan aristocracy of the late nineteenth century. Dash's film depicts life among the Gullah people of Ibo Landing, on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, circa 1902. All these films use a wealth of "ethnographic" detail, especially centering on ritual, clothing, and food. They richly, even fetishistically detail the exquisite costumes that women and men in these societies wore. But these customs are differentially available in recorded history. In short, both the Austen-James-Wharton films and Daughters of the
224 Dust record bygone cultures, but the former draw intertextually on many sources, corroborating and elucidating kn own histories, while g Daughters of the Dust translates into an audiovisual med ium knowlE£ edges that have survived largely as oral history and sense memory. Let us look at the example of hairstyle (see Mercer 1990). Pictog t o rial histories of African Amer ican hairstyles are rare, and probably r-j
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nonexistent for the small Gullah society Hairstyling is a tactile and embodied form of knowledge, passed between generations by demonstration. The wo me n of the Peazant family in the film wear elabo rate and individual hairstyles: braided, twisted, swept into sculp tural arrangements. These styles represent the continuity between African hairstyle traditions and the varied and elaborate fashions in hairstyle among African Americans now. Significantly, the women from the mainland do not wear their hair in elaborate styles; Yel low Mary's hair is long and "natural," as is her lover Trula's, and the Christian Aunt Viola wears her hair in a modest bun. The suggestion is that tactile knowledges such as hairstyling are harder to maintain in an urban and Euro-American setting. Several shorter films and videos have drawn on the ways mem ory is encoded in African-diaspora hairstyles. The harsh judgments about "good" and "bad" hair, subjects of Hairpiece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (Ayoka Chenzira, 1984), Good Hair, Pretty Hair, Curly Hair (Andrew Davis, 1991), and Instant Dread (Dawn Wilkinson, 1998)—a hilarious film about the political havoc that re sults from a hair product that produces instant dreadlocks—"crop" up again in Charlene Gilbert's The Kitchen Blues (1994) when the dreadlocked Gilbert asks Alanna Small, a girl of about eight with strong opinions, "Do I have good hair?" Alanna hesitates before diplomatically answering, "Yeah, um, you would have good hair if you took your dreads out an d straightened it." We get a sense of how memory is continued in the body through the simple act of styling hair, when Alanna says, "I like to do my hair 'cause I, like, always feel how my mother does my hair, and I do that with my dolls and my hair." Like hairstyle, food is an important source of memory in Daugh ters of the Dust. The film devotes a lot of screen time to a lavish celebratory picnic on the beach, in which the camera lingers over platters and baskets of food. Gullah cuisine is something that only survived by word of mouth, or more exactly, by shared practice
73- Frame enlargement from Daughters of the Dust. Courtesy of Kino International.
in the kitchen. The book that Dash, with Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks (1992), published in conjunction with the film is full of recipes, many of which would have been published there for the first time, in acknowledgment that African American history is a body of multiple knowledges. In Marlon Riggs's last video, Black Is, Black Ain't (1995), the cumulative, diverse, and often conflict ing cultures of Black people in North America are metaphorized in gumbo, a dish that simmers for a long time as it assimilates its many ingredients, key to which is okra, a vegetable imported by Africans during the Middle Passage. Like Dash, Riggs lovingly focuses on the dish itself and on the many people who critically taste it and offer their two cents. Food is central to many cultures, of course. My point is, first, that in the absence of other records food becomes even more a vehicle of memory. Second, given that every culture privileges certain sense modalities as vehicles of knowledge, food is more important within
226 gustatory epistemologies than it is, for example, within epistemologies based on vision. The centrality of food to African diasporic culg ture reflects the traditional value of gustatory knowledge in African ES cultures. Among Hausa speakers of north-central Nigeria, many folk £ tales and proverbs center around food, tasting, eating, or swallowing *o (Ritchie 1990,114-16), in a complex gustatory regime of knowledge. 3 Vision is deceiving; only by eating something, the proverbs suggest, 0 can one really know it. Though it would be inaccurate to assign a H gustatory sensorium to all African diasporic peoples on the basis of the Hausa evidence, many African diasporic films and videos place great importance on food, the knowledge entailed in good cooking, and the social rituals around it. For African diasporic people, food is all the more important as a traveling fetish, a reminder of traditional culture that survived the Middle Passage and is embodied anew in every well-cooked gumbo. Donna James, a Jamaican-born artist living in Nova Scotia, made Maigre Dog (1990) to document the piquant proverbs shared by her mother and aunt, in the patois that many Jamaican immigrants as sume only when among friends. "New broom sweep clean but old broom know the corners," her aunt says, and the women explain, laughing, "You get a new boyfriend, but the old one, there is some thing there that you love about him . . . because he knows your ways." Many of these are feisty proverbs about the need to watch your back and to value what is familiar—"Water more than flour: At times things can be really tough with you and you keep quiet and just bear it"; "Sorry for maigre dog, they turn around and bite you That is so true," James's aunt sighs—useful ideas for immigrants to a new country as well as to women who want to be savvy about love. The women also explain the phrase "The higher the monkey climb, the more him expose" that one of the Handsworth residents mutters ironically when the Home Secretary makes a damage-control visit after the riots, in Black Audio's Handsworth Songs (1986). We do not see the women, only hear their rich voices and a calypso song that asks, "Who used to change you diaper. . . ?" James, in her clear Canadian accent, asks about the meaning of the phrases and illus trates them in visual anecdotes, a sweeping broom, a bowl of flour. Like other diasporan artists, she comes to her traditional culture second-hand and must make an effort to learn the language so easily embodied by her foremothers. However, interspersed between the
74. Still from Maigre Dog
women's adages, shots in the kitchen dissolve to show more pots and pans piling up, suggesting that in one place the young woman experiences her traditional culture firsthand: through cooking and eating. Similarly, in Selina Williams's Saar (1994), talk eases the way into an unfamiliar practice, but eating together is what grounds it. In Vancouver, five Canadian women of African and Caribbean de scent gather for a meal and a cleansing ritual called saar. Through food and ritual the women invoke a common ancestry that none of them knows firsthand; the stakes of building this community are emphasized by a radio report of the killing of a Somali by a Cana dian soldier. And another hybrid-food video, What's the Difference Between a Yam and a Sweet Potato? (1992) by Adriene Jenik and J. Evan Dunlap, uses the tubers of the title as metaph ors for a crosscultural lesbian love affair. Paralleling the lovers' fleshy thighs, light and dark, a yam and a sweet potato lie cozily side by side after their long journeys from Africa and South America. A sexy recipe for sweet potato pie with yam jam scrolls down the screen. Eating with one's mothers, sisters, and lovers, all these works suggest, is the be ginning of a new embodiment of hybrid culture, which language and visual images can only partially convey. Dash has stated that she does not intend Daughters of the Dust to be an ethnographic film, which would put viewers in the passive position of co nsumers of knowledge. Instead, the film presents a variety of forms of knowledge and tests them against each other. The
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Gullah people of the film, as much as possible given slave owners' pr ohibition of African languages an d religious practices, have continu ed many of the ways of life of their West African ancestors. While theirs is already a hybrid cultur e, European, urban, and modern practices are impinging on Gullah life at an accelerating rate. Dash rep resents this incursion thr oug h the characters from the mainland who descend on the island for a family reunion: Yellow Mary, the family relation who was "mint" in Cuba and ret urns to visit the family, wit h the young, light-skinned woman Trula, who appears to be her lover; Aunt Viola, who has embraced Christianity an d repudi ates all traditional African spirituality; the photographer Mr. Snead, who has bee n hired to memorialize the family event in frozen, blackand-white images. The latter two figures especially represent forms of knowledge that will challenge the traditional knowledges of the Gullah people. Many of the dilemmas for characters in the film revolve around choosing which kinds of knowledge will best serve their survival and transformation individually and as a group. In one sequence, the film crosscuts between two scenes: an exchange between Nana Peazant, the matriarch of the clan, and her great-grandson Eli; and some girls dancing on the beach. Nana is urging Eli to keep the family's heritage alive when they move up North. Her voice carries over the shots of the young women dancing in a circle, moving into the middle and out again, sinking down to the sand an d rising. Their movement recalls traditional African dance, and African drums and singing echo distantly on the soundtrack. Their dance also reso nates with contemporary dances and double-dutch jumprope. Nana urges Eli, Eli, we carry these memories inside of we. Do you believe that those hun dreds and hundreds of Africans dropped here on this other shore would forget everything they once knew? We don't know where these recollections come from. Sometimes we dream 'em. But we carry these memories inside of we Eli, I'm trying to learn you how to touch your own spirit. I'm trying to give you something to take along with you. Count on those old Africans, Eli. They come to you when you least suspect 'em. They hug you up quick and soft as the warm, sweet wind. Let 'em touch you with the hand of time.
As she speaks, her voice carries over slow-motion shots of the dancers. One dancer turns with her eyes closed, as though looking
de ep insid e; as th ou gh he r ow n bo dy re me mb er s he r herit age. "We
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Gullah and African traditional ways and Christianity. The women talk easily as they prepare shrimp, okra, chicken, and corn, foods available in West Africa that African diasporic people have adapted to local agronomies. One grandmother, sitting in a circle of children, makes them laugh by giving them little horns, made of the ends of okra, which she sticks to their foreheads. She recounts to them a list of African words, which they repeat, starting with "gumbo"; finally she says, "Now, that all what Grandma remember." Later, the children's faces are sullen as Aunt Viola reads to them from the Bible with single-minded fervor, describing a "harvest" not of the abundance of the earth but of Christian souls. "When I left this island, I was a sinner and didn't even know it," she tells them. When the children ask her who is on the mainland, she lifts her eyes fervently to the horizon and says, "Jesus Christ, the son of God." Her persona equates living on the mainland with Christianity, and her cold disapproval of the traditional ways on the island make it clear that they are incompatible with the literary learning of the Bible— although later in the film she has an emotional reconciliation. Cer tainly Christianity has become an integral part of African American oral culture, but Dash points out that it displaced more traditional knowledges. As in Igloolik Isuma's Nunavut, Christianity is rep re sented as not only colonizing the spirit but threatening to replace embodied knowledge with disembodied belief. Sense Knowledge in Diaspora: Translation and Ambivalence
Intercultural cinema seeks to represent sensory experien ces that en code cultural memory. Yet it is ambivalent about the possibility, or even the desirability, of representing sense experience in its fullness.
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The works I consider here strive to recover sensuous geographies
distant in space and time, sense memories faintly present in the g body itself, like whiffs of smoke from a distant fire. If they do manage to recover these precious knowledges, they may use screens and E g ruses to protect them from casual consumption. This ambivalence "o toward the representat ion of the homeland is all the more evident in 22 the work of "second-generation" (or more) artists, whose sensuous © geographies are a mi x of the old culture and the new, whose sensoH ria are not completely at home in either place. In part the ambivalence exists because, given cultural differences in t he use of the senses, it would b e wrong to assume that audiences will b e able to reconstruct the sensuous experiences represented in a work. Cinema is capable not only of depicting the process of in scription of sense memories but also of arousing memories in view ers. As Seremetakis argues, material culture requires completion by the viewer: no artifact exists as knowledge unto itself, but only if there is someone to register its meaning at the level of the body U994> 7)- The senses are educated by local objects and experiences, and interaction with a traditional object can awaken these senses. Given cultural differences in the organization of the sensorium, the sensuous geography characteristic of one culture will not be trans parent to a viewer from another culture. Ethnographic representations of one culture for the consumption of another tend to reduce it to what is visible, and hence readily con sumable. But within another sensory regime of knowledge, such as gustatory knowledge, cultural memories can be explored while re maining somewhat shielded from the desire of outsiders to compre hend the culture visually. Visual anthropology has been critiqued for forcing the cultures it studies into a regime of the visual, inter preting events in terms of visible evidence, ignoring nonvisual ex perience, and in general "colonizing" the studied cultures' sensory orders (Howes 1991c, 172). Trying to understand somebody else's sensory organization, I must acknowledge the bluntness of my sen sory instruments; I may be visually acute but not attuned to the meanings of smell, weight, proximity, and so forth. The shift in anthropology from visual to discursive approaches does not help matters, for it emphasizes aspects of culture that can be verbalized over those that are embodied (Csordas 1994, 11). If one's sensory organization privileges other senses as well as vision, it will be easier
to experience an audiovisual object, like a film, in a multisens ory
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way. If it does not, the object may appear inert because the viewer can not perc eive its mu lti sen sor y qualitie s.
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perience of another culture must include an awareness of our own
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sensory configuration and its limits. When we find there is nothing to see, there may be a lot to feel, or to smell. Cinema may not bring forth these missing senses, but it can certainly evoke them. Intercultural films and videos often vigorously protect their sense memories. In mainstream cinema, references to the nonaudiovisual senses tend to appear as cinematic excess, an extra treat on top of the richness of audiovisual representation. But for intercultural art ists, memories of touch, smell, taste, rhythm are not "extra": they are the very foundation of acts of cultural reclamation and redefinition. This is the difference between recent mainstream movies praised for their "sensuousness"—one might think of the films of Chen Kaige, the later films of Peter Greenaway, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996), and any nu mb er of other films rich in multisensory allusion—and intercultural works that draw upon the senses. The former approach their subject from a position of wealth: they have all the means of representation at their disposal, and information about taste, for example, merely complements the films' verbal and visual images. The latter are struggling to recreate sensory memo ries, and to find the diasporan artist's place wit hin his or her sensory tradition. These memories are approached from a position not of wealth of information, sensory and otherwise, but of scarcity. Recall Hamid Naficy's suggestion that smell, taste, and touch "often provide, more than sight and hearing, poignant reminders of difference and of separation from homeland" (Naficy 1993, 153). Naficy shows that cinema can call upon collective sensory experi ences to respond to exiles' longing for their homeland (156). More tha n someone who has always lived in one place, the exile is acutely aware of his or her sensuous geographies, both of the new land and the one left behind. Aware of the differences between the sensuous
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geography she grew up with, which informs the way her body inhab its the world, and the one she now inhabits, the exile cannot simply g replicate the sensuous wealth of the world she once knew. Of course, PS this describes more local moves as well, from the farm to the city, for example, or from hu mi d Alabama to gray Boston; sensuous dislocag *o tion is a matter of degree. Nevertheless, in large and violent disloca^ tions caused by colonialism and exile, it is especially disingenuous © to try to offer up the sensuous experience of the homeland on a plate. E-1 Mira Nair might represent a mythical and richly sensuous India in Kama Sutra (1996), but the film's kaleidoscope of gleaming bodies, saturated colors, trails of incense, and accented English seems to pander to Western wet dreams rather than appeal to the emigrant's longing for the homeland. Pasolini could represent a mythical and richly sensuous Orient in Arabian Nights (1974), bu t a contempo rary Arab filmmaker would be hypocritical to do the same: We do not go to the West to be indoctrinated by their culture, for the imperi alism, hegemony of their culture is nowhere clearer than here in the Third World. But both because it is there that we can be helped in our resistance by all that we do not receive in the Third World: their experimental films and videos, their avant-garde theater, their improvised jazz; and because we can meet people who, unlike those from one's own culture, can look at and genuinely use pre-disaster art and culture without having to resurrect them.... When following the devastation of Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan (and earlier of Palestine), etc., I can have the same close relation with one of the most beautiful books of the Middle East, A Thousand and One Nights, as [John] Barth or Pasolini [Arabian Nights, 1974) can, then I will know that I am either a hypo-critical Arab writer or already a Western writer. (Toufic 1996, 69-70)
To attempt to recreate a culture lost in the ruins of Beirut, Jalal Toufic writes, would be disingenuous at best, imperialist at worst. Works by Middle Eastern diasporan artists that I have discussed, such as Ra'ad's Missing Lebanese Wars, Ra'ad and Salloum's Talaeen a Junuub, Haj-Ismail's I Wet My Hands . . . , Hatoum's Measures of Distance, Al-Kassim's Far From You, and Toufic's own Credits Included, shy away from delivering the sensory richness of their homelands to viewers. To deliver it would be to pretend that the disasters of civil war and exile were only small impediments to the tourist's hungry gaze. It would also be to pretend that these scat-
75 and 76. Stills from A Box of His Own
tered artists, living in Rochester, Vancouver, San Francisco, and the internal diaspora of destroyed Beirut, were capable of an immediate sensory connection to a time and place irrevocably lost to them. The difference between how a diasporan artist would like to re activate sensory memories of the homeland, and how he actually does, is the subject of Yudi Sewraj's poignant A Box of His Own (i997)- Sewraj, a Montrealer born in Guyana, returns to his ances tral country for the first time in twenty years. This part of the tape is a video diary, full of bright colors and Sewraj's elated descrip tions of food, the humid weather, and the tapping of rain on the tin roof. He revels in this newfound sensuousness, not unlike a tourist enchanted by the unfamiliar smells and tastes of a foreign land. Voiced-over letters to folks back home reveal a growing enchant-
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ment with the place, culminating with letters where he breaks up with his white girlfriend and reveals that he is engaged to a Guyag nese woman. £ When Sewraj returns to Montreal, the tape shifts tone abruptly. pg The colors give way to gray; the rolling, verdan t landscape gives way *o to the perpendiculars of his sterile apartment. Back home, the artist 3 builds the box of the title: a tiny room with a door, a chair, a video (x, monitor behind the lone viewer's head, and a mirror in which he can H gaze at the reflected images of his ancestral land. The "box" is essen tially a peep-show booth, where Sewraj positions himself as a voy eur onto the world he briefly and blissfully inhabited, now reduced to a flat and silent image. In Guyana he was surrounded by enthusi astic, long-lost relatives; here the only hu ma n contacts are the kindly but distant voices of his worried friends filtered through the answer ing machine. In this sad scene, the artist reveals his own disavowal: I know that I am a Montrealer and that this cold city has shaped how I perceive the world; but nevertheless I long for the sensu ous knowledge that would have been mine (if I hadn't left Guyana). Rather than claim the smells and tastes, the prickle of moisture on his skin and the sound of rain, as his rightful heritage, Sewraj must acknowledge that the longing for those experiences, rather than the experiences themselves, is his heritage. Finally a snappy phone mes sage from the abandoned girlfriend galvanizes a change of heart in Sewraj. The tape concludes in fast rewind, in effect reversing the visit to the homeland and deconstructing the box. Intercultural movies about food also explore the ambivalent re lationship to the sensuous experiences of the homeland. Plenty of documentary and ethnographic films have used images of food and eating to show, as it were, the essence of a culture. Like travel docu mentaries and commercial pornography, they package sensuous in formation as yet another commodity. One could call "food porn" a film that reduces cultural rituals around food and eating to a con sumable, visual image. 10 By contrast, intercultural films and videos use food as an entry to memory, troubling any easy access to the memories food represents. Intercultural "food films" and videos point out that the seemingly ahistorical rhythm of cooking and eating food provides an alterna tive framework for the exploration of cultural memory. The mem ory of a flavor, as food writer Jeff Weinstein's description in the
epigraph to this chapter suggests, traces an elusive course between 235 individual and cultural memory. This memory is not simply that of the exile, longing Proust-like for the memories aroused by the ^ scent of green papaya, pierogies, or salt fish, but the memory that ° threads between the disparate points in which identities are trans- CD formed. For many intercu ltur al filmmakers, their "in si deme ss" to a o traditional culture cannot b e assumed. Many of these artists grow 0 up somewhere between their traditional cultu re and the Western £. society in which they live. They must struggle to recreate sensory co CD
memories, and to use them to "make sense" of the artist's place in a
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hybrid culture—for example, by learning to cook traditional dishes in a land of hamburgers. In Paul Kwan and Arnold Iger's Anatomy of a Spring Roll (1992), the artists compare the social practice of cook ing among Vietnamese immigrants and what they see as the solitary, rationalized style of American cooking. To dramatize the difference, Kwan and his mother prepare spring rolls against the background of a Muybridge-style analytic grid, their movements analyzed for efficiency and the resulting product tested on a "crunch-o-meter." His return visit to Saigon serves only to increase his respect for his culture: "The Vietnamese have been colonized and bombed for cen turies and they've produced great food. The Americans have been free for 200 years and they've produced the Big Mac." Given the traditional centrality of cooking to Chinese ritual, medi cine, and cosmology (Tuan 1993, 51-53), it is understandable that a sturdy subgenre of Chinese diaspora films and videos deals with food. Some of these works seem to fetishize food, in what seems to be a turning of a colonial gaze on the artists' own traditions. Yet a number of these works show ambivalence toward food and what it traditionally represents. Many Asian video- and filmmakers are pre sumed to have a rich heritage of food but in fact do not; yet around them non-Asians unproblematically fetishize Asian food and asso ciate Asians' identity with a great meal (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 1994, 208). Thus a sub-subgenre has sprung up, of Chinese dias pora works with a vexed relationship to food and cu lture. Even in Ang Lee's mainstream hit, Eat Drink Man Woman, exquisite dishes remain uneaten as the family sulks around the table. In one scene of Yau Ching's experimental documentary Flow (1993), a Chinese bor n, New York-based artist cooks up a spattering stir-fry, wearing an elaborate silk robe. Her impractical dress for the kitchen parodies
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a Western cultural imaginary of Chineseness. In Karen Kew and Ed Sinclair's Chasing the Dragon (1993), a voluptuous Asian phone-sex worker named Cherry appeals to a particular Western kink: "How about spicy tofu with black bean sauce?", she croons to a caller. "Is that hot en ough for you?" This spoof is the first half of a tape that goes on to explore Western stereotypes of Asian sexuality—"exotic" women, sexually "neutral" men. In a final twist, Cherry turns out to be a man. Food, oral signifier of exoticism, is the locus of displaced Western notions of Asian sensuality; and by extension, of the threat of the foreign. In Shu Lea Cheang's Fresh Kill (1994), a wildly hybrid feature with an environmentalist theme, scripted by Jessica Hagedorn, New York yuppies gorge themselves on sushi, the food fetish of the eighties nouveau riche. When the sushi turns out to be made of radioactive fish and the diner s notice themselves begin ning to phosphoresce, they prudently switch to Tex-Mex. Fresh Kill mocks the exoticism and paranoia that surround imported cuisines and, implicitly, the less-manageable immigrants they represent (see Marks 1994b). Many Asian diaspora works express the struggle to come to terms with hybrid identity in terms of hybrid eating. Just two examples of this thriving genre are By the Thinnest Root (1995) by Richard Kim, in which a Korean American youth attempts to please his traditional father by learning to manage chopsticks, and The Search for Peking Dog (John Choi, 1995), in whic h a German housewife, in a misunder standing characteristic of Western attitudes toward Chinese "omnivorousness," attempts to prepare the delicacy of the title for her Chinese American husband . Filmmaker Laurie Wen, who emigrated to the United States from Hong Kong when she was twelve years old, begins her documentary The Trained Chinese Tongue (1994) by describing her childhood ambivalence and resentment toward her culture of origin, especially as it was manifested in cooking. But recently she has begun cooking Chinese meals herself, and she ob serves that now that she frequents Chinese markets, "I've been won dering about people who live with the same sounds and smells": the old woman wearing six sweaters, the stylish businesswoman, the teenagers trying to learn the names of ingredients. Wen approaches women in the fish market in Boston's Chinatown and asks if they would let her follow them home and watch them cook. The ensuing four encounters demonstrate that commonalities in cultural mem-
77. Frame enlargement from The Trained Chinese Tongue
ory are always mediated around differences, and that food provides not only a source of performative, shared cultural memor y bu t also a marker of many kinds of disjunction: of generation, language, class, and place. In the course of these interactions, Wen finds that the ways in which groups share memories of food are highly idiosyn cratic. These memories may be the only thing they have in common. Food enters new cultural systems of communication—as with the well-to-do businessmen who use a meal to impress each other in a hybrid of Chinese and middle-class American. These interviews over food seem to be asking: do you taste it the way I taste it? Why not? In the scene that gives the film its title, the abilities of the tongue to get itself around Chinese words and Chinese food is the subject of most of the conversation. Mr. Bao, a Chinese American businessman whose wife is from Hong Kong, insists that no Asian can pronounce the words "Fort Lauderdale." But, he says, "we Americans" do not have the facility to extract small bones from a piece of chicken in side our mouths; that is only something a "trained Chinese tongue" can do. This film, like Daughters of the Dust, Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls, Seeing Is Believing, Measures of Distance, and many other works I have discussed, shows how sense memories are trans formed in the process of diaspora. Cinema can only capture the fla vor of home in freeze-dried form: by isolating a moment of cultur al
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plenitud e that wou ld henceforth define wha t the culture is—or was. There is a disingenuousness in the attempt to isolate a typical featur e of cultural memory that is only perceived as such in retrospect. The Trained Chinese Tongue manages to captur e, through the memory of the senses, both the search for a culture of origin and the impossibility of that search from a position of diaspora. And diaspora begins at home; as Jeff Weinstein's lam ent about the search for the flavor of apple pie reminds us , there is no essential flavor of home: My favorite gift this holiday season came from my mother—a stocking stuffer called "Country Baker Apple Pie Scent," by Avon. "Scent the air with the scrumptious aroma of apple pie. Bring back the delicious memories of Mother's kitchen. SHAKE CAN WELL." It smells precisely like the real thing, if the real thing is that apple pielet wrapped in plastic paper, "flavoring added," sold almost everywhere. This concoction was the first apple pie my neighbor's daughter ever ate. It may have been my first as well. (1988, i2g) Wen's film begins with a memory in which a sensory disjunc tion expressed a cultural dislocation: when as a girl she practiced the piano at home, the kitchen smells of frying things and black bean sauce "always put a greasy Chinese taint on my Chopin or Beethoven." This early memory relates the ambivalent relationship between the sense knowledges associated with Wen's Chinese birth culture and the American culture she now inhabits. Throughout the film there is an ambivalence between these two kinds of knowl edge. Are the cultural knowledges of home, based in the deeply felt senses of smell and taste, more true, and learned Western cul tural knowledges false or imposed?—especially when these learned knowledges take the highly disciplined form of Chopin etudes, which are not only audiovisual but learned by the body of the young musician. Wen's interviews over meals suggest that the relationship between these two kinds of knowledge is ambivalent and complex. The more she pursues other Chinese women to find some point of cultural commonality around food, the more elusive this common ality becomes.
Beyond Nostalgia, Beyond Envy: Sense Memory and Intercultural Transformation
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Intercultural cinema is beginning to explore different sensory organizations, and the different orders of knowledge they evoke. Because this work is produce d in the flux between cultures, it ten ds to present sense experience not in freeze-dried form, but in the productive conflict between different ways of knowing. Ho wever ,.^ audiences will have different degrees of access to the intercultural
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cinema of the senses, given each of our own cultural backgrounds. Shani Mootoo's magnolia, Marlon Riggs's gumbo, and Steve Reinke's canned peas arouse different sensory associations for me than they did for these artists. The steaming innards of freshly killed animals, which the hunters eagerly devour in Nunavut, initially arouse no sensory associations for me, though after a few episodes I find my self salivating at the sight of fresh seal liver. Other images leave me baffled, without any way to embody the experience represented on screen. The bafflement in the face of the representation of unfamil iar sense experiences is an aspect of intercultural relations that is unavoidable and salutary: it provides the ground of respect for cul tural differences that must precede intercultural learning. This bafflement may also compel the viewer of intercultural cinema to confront her own sense envy. As I have noted, popu lar cinema and television attempt unproblematically to deliver a world of senses to the viewer; travelogues, conventional ethno graphic films, art-house imports, and other films present a foreign culture with seeming transparency. Occasionally intercultural films and videos do this as well, in a sort of neocolonialist gaze at their own (or former) culture. Such works, directed to a viewer perfectly comfortable in the dominant culture, represent sense knowledges as commodities, supplements to the wealth of the viewer's other re sources. Intercultural cinema, in contrast, represents sense knowl edges from a position not of wealth but of scarcity, as the precious vessels of memory. These knowledges, difficult to recall and to rep resent cinematically, will not be available to every viewer. Thus intercultural cinema troubles the ease with whic h we approach cul tures not our own. Sense envy, the desire of one culture for the sensory knowledge of another, has an enduring history. Like the traveling fetishes I dis-
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cussed in chapter 2, sense knowledge always undergoes translation in the movement from one culture to another. For example, the use g of incense and perfumes, and the resins and animal products on £ which they are based, have followed a pat h over the centuries of jg importation from East to West: musk, cassia, and sandalwood from *o China to India, frankincense and jasmine from India to Egypt, in3 cense from Egypt to Greece, and all these products thence to Europe © - (Stoddart 1990, 155, 169-70). At each stop, incense and perfumes H took on connotations of an ever more distant, ever more exotic Ori ent, as well as new connotations, such as the (debated) sanctity of incense in the Catholic Church. 11 All cultures borrow sensory ex per ien ce from others: this is a factor in cultural change, like the mov ement of languages. Sacred incen se in one cultur e is taken up as a seductive perfume in another; ordinary soft drinks in one culture are used to commemorate special occasions in another. However, colonial expansion has been especially influenced by sense longing. The spice roads, medieval information highways for sensory knowl edge, wer e founded on the routes cut by the military campaign of the Crusades in the eleventh century. So were the European imports, be ginning in the sixteenth century, of tea from China, coffee from Tur key and Arab countries, and chocolate from Mexico (Schivelbusch 1992). All these new sources of sensory stimulation became neces sary luxuries to their importers and were the foundations of global movements of conquest, colonizations, and enslavement. Colonized cultures have also made adaptive use of their colonizers' sensory knowledges, and simple trade has also facilitated the travels of new sensory experiences from one culture to another. As I suggested in my critique of some of the anthropologists of the senses, the contemporary longing in Western countries and urban centers for a soothing "return" to the senses has an undeniable cast of neo-Orientalism. The current interest in smell in postindustrial societies has parallels in the nineteenth-century European fascina tion with imported scents. Fashions for the scents of the Orient, such as jasmine, sandalwood, and hashish, followed European colo nizations of North Africa and India. The Symbolist poets cast down their gazes and instead built languages of smell (Jay 1993a); the Postimpressionist painters drew inspiration from imagined "primitive" cultures, for a world in which knowledge was not at odds with sen suality.
These two waves of interest in smell, and the proximal senses in 241 general, are inextricable from the development of the visual tech nologies of photography, "pre-cinematic" spectacles, and cinema in _3 the mid- to late ninet een th century, and the proliferation of visual ® media in the late twentieth. In each case, the appeal to the proximal CD senses seems to reflect a fear that visual technologies alienate indio viduals from their bodies. Also in each case, the tendency has been 0 to look to cultures that are perceived as less alienated for sources g. of nonvisual sensory stimulation. Consequently, at the en d of the twentieth century, the interest in smell continues, newly commodi-
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fied—as in the fashion for aromatherapy, or the appropriation of sweetgrass from Native American rituals by New Age cults. Yet this rise of multisensory desire does not denote a fundamental reconfiguration of the Western (or more particularly, North Ameri can/northern European) sensorium. We cannot simply will our selves into new forms of sense knowledge. The individual brain may learn quickly, but the acculturated body is slower, and cul ture is slow to change indeed. Even though eating another culture's food and dancing to its music for long enough gives a little sense of how other people sensuously inhabit their world, we cannot in habit another culture's sensorium tout court. If human existence "is a mode of being that functions in the articulation of thought on w hat is unthought" (Heidegger, quoted in Foucault 1970, 322), our ques tioning of the limits of sensory knowledge is a confrontation with an unthought. In other words, much as I might like to, I cannot boot strap myself into another form of perception. However, we can look for tensions within ocularcentrism that have existed all along, ele ments that are either within Western culture or have flowed into it from elsewhere. And we can acknowledge the other ways of know ing, including the knowledge of the senses, that will become more widespread as the global movement of diasporic peoples to wha t we call the West continues. Indeed, one of the ways that "Western" will cease to be be an appropriate adjective to describe the society in which we live is that the organization of our sensoria will increas ingly reflect the mixing and merging of cultures. Intercultural cinema is performing this recombination of sensory experiences. Intercultural filmmakers and videomakers know that it would be false to attempt to reproduce the sensory experience of their culture of origin. Yet they resist the sensory organization of the
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society in which they find themselves, and they are critical of the cinematic apparatus that tends to reflect this organization. Thus we can look to these works to pu sh the cinematic apparatus in order to represent the memory of home in its multisensory fullness—and when that fails, to represent the emerging sensorium that is a product of both memory and change.
Conclusion: The portable sensorium
We have reached the end of a long, doubtless taxing, but I hope re warding journey through the fascinating body of work that is inter cultural cinema. I have pursued what I believe are the most inter esting and least theorized aspects of these many films and videos, namely the many strategies they use to extract memory from the limitations of the audiovisual moving image. We have moved from memory-images to memory-objects to the memories of touch, smell, and taste. With each chapter the source of memory has seemed to move further from the image proper and closer to the body. With each remove of memory from image to body, it may seem ever more unlikely that cinema would be a rewarding medium through which to try to represent these memories. Yet I have argued that a memo ry is precious in inverse propo rtion to its ability to be externalized and expressed. Moreover, for people whose histories are represented in few other ways, it is these valuable and deeply guarded memories of tastes, smells, and caresses that must be coaxed into audiovisual form. Thus it is in intercultural cinema that we find some of the most sincere and most cautious efforts to effect this delicate transla tion. For intercultural artists it is most valuable to think of the skin of the film not as a screen, but as a membrane that brings its audi ence into contact with the material forms of memory. In conclusion, let me ask how cultural sensoria might come to be shaped as global cultures continue to mix and hybridize. Pessi mists will argue that commodification and globalization will wipe out cultural differences at the very level of sensuous experience.
244 However, I see reason for hope that intercultural life will continue to produce new and unmanageable hybrids, given the volatility of g sensuous experience. It seems reasonable to worry that as culture E becomes globalized, sensuous experience is becoming both univer jg sal and placeless. "Non-places," or generic places (malls, airports) 'o are proliferating around the world (Auge 1995) and would seem £ to bring with them certain sensory organizations. These entail not 0 only an increasingly visual, specifically optical and symbolic, world, H but also the abstraction and symbolization of all sense modalities. Although vision is the sense most commonly associated with control and with packaging into signs, any sense can be turned to these uses. Paul Rodaway captures a difference between the rich environment of ambient sound typical of rural life, and the packaged, often elec tronically reproduced sounds of urban environments, used either as decoration (for example, Muzak) or as warning (sirens, alarm clocks). I find that some urban warning sounds seem to have turned into aural decorations, such as the ubiquitous cycling car alarms that reassuringly signify one's arrival in the city. But all these sounds make for a thin and instrumental auditory relationship to the world, "an auditory geography of hearing rather than listening, of juxta position rather than relationship" (Rodaway 1994,158). Similarly, since the Middle Ages, smell in Western urban societies has been increasingly purged from its origins as much as possible and re-presented in packaged form. Now scents are sprayed into offices to stimulate workers, bottled at the Body Shop to soothe har ried urbanites. The "aroma of the commodity" (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994) now floats from the shifting centers of multinational capital to the furthest corners of the market. As smells are synthe sized and marketed, their indexical link to a particular place is sev ered, so that "everyone" can now scent their rooms with mountain pine air freshener whether or not they have ever known a real pine tree (Rodaway 1994,153). Avon ladies, traveling by canoe when nec essary, now ply Crystal Splash cologne to villages in the Amazon (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994, 181). (This fact is more ironic in light of the fact that European perfumers travel to the Amazon in search of flowers, woods, and insects on which to base their new formulas.) As commodities, generic smells and tastes replace par ticular, local ones: fewer people savor the rodahkino than taste the packaged apple pielet, and more people around the world prefer
to mask with Eternity the mix of person- and place-smells that is theirs alone. When it is separated from its source and packaged, smell becomes a simulacrum, the scent of nonplace. Interestingly, in John Waters's Polyester all the "good" smells, wit h the dubious exception of a hothouse rose, are synthetic—"new car smell," the flowery air freshener that Divine sprays around her hu dd led friends at the end, cooing, "Everything's going to be all right. Doesn't that smell better?"—while all the "bad" smells, such as farts and smelly sneakers, are of more or less natural origin. Smell technologies are achieving the work of olfaction in the age of chemical reproduc tion. Surely there already exists a sensorium of the commodity, in versions both privileged (aromatherapy, Starbucks coffee, cashmere sweaters) and bare-bones (Kraft dinner, Air-wick, America's Top 40 on the radio anywhere in the world). In fact, one might suggest that the uncommodified sensorium has become a luxury of the very rich and the very poor, who can afford not to, or cannot afford to, use the packaged foods and smells and sounds and images that have be come necessities to the people in between. Yet even in this world of increasingly generic senses, particular sense memories are places within nonplaces. Against the tide of the commodification and genericization of sense experience, pools of local sensuous experience are continually created anew. When people move to a new place, even to the sensuous nonplace of a North American suburb, they bring this experience with them. They bring sensory experience in practices like cooking, music, an d reli gious ritual, and around these are created new, small sensuous geog raphies whose mon uments are grocery stores, places of wors hip, cof fee and tea shops, and kitchens. And they bring sensory experience in their very bodies, in the organization of their sensoria, that per ceive the new environment in a different light (texture, and smell) than do its older inhabitants. Especially for the hybrid people of the urban metropole, sensuous geographies form a kind of microculture within mass culture. Sometimes this microculture is contained only within the sense memories of a single person. Also, there is no doubt that the ladies of the Amazon use their Avon products differently than do their North American counter parts. Every sensuous artifact, even the most banal, is uniquely embodied, worked upon, and transformed into a new sensory ex perience. In Igloolik Isuma's Nunavut (1995) the white priest uses
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packaged biscuits to bribe a boy to come to church. But these bis cuits take on a different meaning and a different taste (not to say an g odor of sanctity) from what they ha d in the South, just as surely as gjj the Inuit family transforms the Christmas practices of carol singing PQ and gift giving to a more appropriate local use. "o In Los Angeles, where I lived during part of the writing of this 22 book, the farmers' markets taught me that sensuous experience is © recombinant. Southern California farmers grow for an international H market, which is fairly standardized by requir ements of quality, uni formity, and transportability. But they also grow produce for re gional populations of recent immigrants and for consumers who for various reasons avoid standardized breeds and farming methods. Vegetables and fruits familiar to Latin American, Caribbean, Chi nese, Vietnamese, and other communities in this recombinant city are for sale here; so are organic produce and "boutique" fodder like baby vegetables and frisee lettuce. Many people buy their food at the farmer's market, both long-term Americans in search of new sense experiences and recent arrivals seeking to approximate the sense experiences they remember. Most people end up going home with a basket that represents a world of potential sense experience, and perhaps with some hybrid cooking tips. As world populations continue to regroup in flows of exile and emigration, sensuous geographies are like islands in the sea of sen sory nonplaces. I often used to take the train that crossed the river from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Niagara Falls, New York. We would wait for an hour as the Canadian staff left the train, the U.S. staff boar ded, and U.S. customs officials came through. Invariably, cus toms interrogated every person of color on the train, as well as confiscating raw fruit and other possible contaminants. Once I was sitting across from an Indian family and envying them their lunch, which despite being neatly packed in plastic containers wafted its aroma across the aisle. The U.S. customs officials suspiciously opened the containers. Although it was obviously cooked and posed no health threat, they confiscated the Indian family's meal (and not, I think, because they wanted to eat it themselves). I am convinced that a less fragrant, less /oreigri-smelling meal would have been safe. Smells do not respect walls or national borders: they drift and infuse and inhabit. The smell of curry must have been an uncon scious metonymy for all that the U.S. government, in the persons
of its customs agents, fears of unregulated immigration. The Indian (Canadian) family was carrying a sensorium in their Tupperware containers, carving out a sensuous place in the non place of the train, and arousing suspicion. In general, increased regulations on food importation, according to the rules of the European Union and the North American "Free" Trade Agreement, mad cow disease paranoia, and other instances denote not just the fear of infestation but a fear of others' sensuous geographies. For sensuous geographies can be contained in traveling objects—in curries, saris, sweet potatoes, and all the other volatile things I have described in this book. It would seem that cinema is an inert medium that can cross national borders without generat ing such fear of infection. But as I have argued throughout, cinema has the power to bring those radioactive fossils to life. As it does, it diffuses into the world a strange, new fragrance, which perhaps someday we will know how to smell.
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Preface i Cinema studies has dealt with some of the ways cinema represents these seemingly excessive sensuous experiences, notably in work on melodrama (see for example Dyer 1985, Thompson 1986). These analyses ultimately explain excess in terms of a semiotic spillover that resonates on the un conscious level. This argument is valuable but somewhat different from the embodied response I wish to define. It can be argued that psychoanalytic explanations ultimately found meaning linguistically, rather than in the body, thus translating sensuous meaning into verbal meaning. I concentrate here on the bodily and sensuous responses to cinema that are meaning ful as such, since meaning is produced at the very level of our sensuous perceptions.
Introduction 1 Many of these terms sprang from particular political and/or intellectual movements and originated in manifestos, legislative initiatives, or germinal scholarly works. The term "Third World" was adopted at the 1955 Bandung Conference of nonaligned United Nations members from Africa and Asia (see Shohat and Stam 1995, 25). "Multicultural" and "antiracist" are both terms associated with government policy initiatives in Canada (for "multi cultural") and Britain (for "antiracist"). A partial list of sources in which some of these terms have been influentially theorized includes: for mestizo and mestisaje, Anzaldiia (1987); for "hybridity," Bhabha (1985); for "imper fect cinema," Garcia Espinosa ([1970] 1997); for "Third Cinema," Solanas and Getino ([1969] 1983); for "hybrid cinema," Fusco (1991); for "transna tional cinema," Zimmermann and Hess (1997); for "interstitial mode of production," Naficy (1999). It is less relevant to attempt to locate an origin for the other terms, which are either common usage or burst onto the scene of intellectual and cultural production so explosively that they cannot be attributed to an "author."
The overwhelming pressure upon academics to produce new scholarship at a faster pace than it can be consumed is doubtless the main reason that so many concepts become stretched beyond recognition and discarded like old socks, "postmodern," "postcolonial," and "hybrid" being some of the most recent casualties. Note that "Black" in the British context includes people of the African and South Asian diasporas; it aligns roughly with the terms "people of color" in the United States and Canada and "visible minorities" in Canada. It is usually capitalized, and I will generally use this form when writing of the British context. I use the term "First Nations" most frequently in this writing, since it sig nifies these groups' sovereignty with relation to the land. It also connotes the historical indebtedness of eighteenth-century European theorists of the nation to First Nations precedents such as the Iroquois confederacy. The terms "native," indigenous," and "aboriginal" do not connote the existence of these peoples as political entities. However, they are sometimes more appropriate to describe traditionally nomad ic people, such as the Inuit, for whom sovereignty does not necessarily (until recently in Canada, with the establishment of the self-governing territory of Nunavut) imply residence in a particular geographic area. "Native American" inscribes the lately arrived European presence into the name of the first inhabitants; and of course "Indian" memorializes European explorers' historic bad navigation skills. Nevertheless, many First Nations people themselves use these latter two terms, for convenience or irony. I use the name of individual nations or tribes wherever possible and appropriate. Still, the search for the "correct" way to name aboriginal groups is doomed to failure, since even tribal names are often European transcriptions and often of the name that the geographi cally adjacent people had for the group in question. See Durham (1993) for an ironic excursion into this mise-en-abime of naming. These events are well documented in Fusco (1988a), Gilroy (1987), and Mercer (1994a). The exchange between Salman Rushdie (1988) and Stuart Hall (1988c) over Handsworth Songs, published in The Guardian and reprinted in Black Film, British Cinema, shows what is at stake in the double movement of de struction and emergence. Rushdie complained that the film was so busy de constructing the racist discourse around the Handsworth riots that it never gave voice to the "ghosts of stories" evoked in the film—an oddly positivist complaint from one who so eloquently describes the pain from which new stories arise. In his rejoinder, Hall argued that the film used experimental strategies such as reworked documentary footage and narrative interrup tion in the struggle, "precisely, to find a new language." Rushdie's desire for full-formed stories, he suggested, was understandable but premature.
1. The
Memory of Images
i Reda Bensmaia (1994) explains this process in a reflection u pon one of Deleuze's strange but provocative terms for cinema, the "spiritual automaton." "Cinema as spiritual automaton is that 'machine' that puts thought into contact with an Outside which comes to subvert the nature of the relations
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of representation that exist, in cinema, between the image and reality" (176; my translation). In a great film, as in any great work of art, there is always something of the open (178): the spiritual automaton is that machine that adds n dimensions to the first and second dimensions of shot-countershot. So whereas for the Lacanian theorists of suture, the pairing of shot with countershot is a way of arresting the fear of the void that waits beyond the edges of the frame, for Deleuze this openness is a source for ever more dis coveries, a source of the new. Cinema can choose to seal up those openings or to keep pointing toward them, opening itself to the possibilities of what cannot yet be said. I do not argue in writing about the limits of thought, that all repre sentations will become possible in the progress of human culture; for of course over history certain kinds of representation will become impossible as others become possible. Perhaps the desire for representation, the desire to make culture visible and graspable, is itself a historically specific desire, characteristic of a post-Enlightenment will to knowledge. Perhaps we are entering an age that does not place a premium on representation. These "forms of luminosity" have the emergent qualities of Firstness, C. S. Peirce's semiotic category for signs that are pure affect and not yet per ceptible. I explore the relationship between Deleuze and Peirce in Marks, in press. I am grateful to John Yemen, a student in my "Hybrid Cinema" class at Carleton University in Spring 1997, for pointing out the powerful effect of this image. Marcel Proust writes that the reconstitution of memories from the bite of tea-soaked madeleine was like "ce jeu ou les Japonais s'amusent a tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d'eau, des petits morceaux de papier jusque-la indistincts qui, a peine y sont-ils plonges, s'etirent, se contournent, so colorent, se differencient.. . ." ([1919] 1954, 47). My students com pare the process to Sea Monkeys, those little dessicated creatures that can be reconstituted in water. A great number of intercultural films use the body as the medium for some kind of healing ritual. These include, to mention some that I do not discuss elsewhere in these pages, the works of Thomas Allen Harris— Splash (1991), Black Body (1992), Heaven, Earth, and Hell (1994), and Encounter at the Intergalactic Cafe (1997), Barbara McCullough's film Water Ritual #1: An Urban Site of Purification (1990), and Pratibha Parmar's Sari Red (1988) and Khush (1991). Isaac Julien's films The Attendant and Frantz Fanon: White Skin, Black Masks (1995), use sadomasochism as a way to confront colonial
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wounds. Again, the move from overtly activist filmmaking to a contem plat pl atio ionn of the th e bo body dy as a site of po politi litical cal expre ex pressi ssion on seems see ms to have taken tak en place pla ce a little earlie ear lierr amon am ongg British Bri tish th t h an among amo ng North No rth Amer A merica icann filmmakers. filmma kers. Nume Nu mero rous us other oth er films exam ex amin inee dias di aspo pora rann peop pe ople le's 's explor exp lorati ation on of sexu s exualit alityy outside the fetishizing relations of the white-"other" dyad; for a discussion of some of these see Marks 1993.
2. The Memory of Things For example, Robert Young's Alambrista (1978 (1978), ), Luis Valdovino's Valdovin o's Work in (1997) 7) all follow the Progress (1990), and Alex Rivera's Animaquiladora (199 movement of migrant farm workers from Mexico to California (in the satirical solution of Animaquiladora, Mexican Mexi can farm workers work ers can "cyber"cybercommute" to California farms). These workers' misery and political disenfranchisement directly correlate to the U.S. economy's dependence on their exploitability and political invisibility. This reciprocality, the sense that transnationalism is a mutual infection between the United States and Mexico, also informs the the th e videos and performances of Guillermo GomezPefia, for example, El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD (1995): he addresses an Anglo audience in a hyper-real mixture of Mexican Span ish, English, and the techno-horrific language of of the slightly distant future. Amos Gitai's Bangkok Bahrain (198 (1985) 5) follows a similar simil ar flow of of worke wor kers rs be be tween a poor country and a wealthy one; in this case it is Thai men who are employed as manual laborers in Bahrain, while the money that flows into Thailand from outside is mostly from foreign tourists to the sex indus try in which many Thai women work. A number of films and videos trace the global commerce of sex work: as well as Bangkok Bahrain, there are Dennis O'Rourke's The Good Woman of Bangkok (19 (1992) 92);; By Byun un Young Joo's (1993) 3),, a docume doc umenta ntary ry on the sex trade betwe b etween en A Woman Being in Asia (199 Korean sex workers and Japanese and other male tourists; Kathy High's Underexposed: The Temple of the Fetus (1992), a videotape on the traf fic in high-tech fertility, which exposes the use of third-world women as incubators for first-world babies; and The Salt Mines (199 (1990) 0) by Carlos Carlo s Aparicio and Susana Aiken, a documentary of the lives of Latinos (all men) living on Manhattan's piers, who live the triply hazardous life of being undocumented, homeless, and sex workers. Of course, since it was facing the sky, the piece of tar paper may have missed a lot too.... Indeed Benjamin's distinction between the material history of the object and narrative history is somewhat somewhat comparable to Foucault's Foucault's distinction be be tween seeable and sayable, though to draw in those terms would make this discussion interminable. Eric Michaels describes a similar form of cultural production that is pretranslated for export, namely, acrylic versions of traditional Australian Ab original sand paintings, in Bad Aboriginal Art (1993).
5 As Gayatri C. Spivak (19 1990 90)) has ha s po poin inte tedd out, out , when wh en the Western Weste rn intell int ellec ec-- 25 2533 tual establishment (which includes the art world) includes selected thirdworlders worlde rs it is doubly silencing other o thers, s, namely those who do not have access to elite education educatio n and international internation al institutions. o 6 In this thi s I am suggesting a life life of the th e object different from from what wh at Susan Stewart Stewa rt w posit po sitss (1984). (1984). Stewart Stewa rt argue a rguess that th at the th e fetish, fe tish, or souve so uvenir nir (at least the t he "hom "h omooo materia mat eriall object," object," a term te rm Stewart bo borro rrows ws from Umberto Umb erto Eco for for an object 53that existed at the site of the event to be remembered, such as the rib- >n bonn from a corsage), bo corsag e), does doe s no nott main ma inta tain in any mate ma teria riall rela re lati tion on to an even ev entt 8 butt is impo bu im port rtan antt precis pre cisely ely beca be caus usee it subs su bstit titut utes es for for an event ev ent:: it elicit eli citss a stream of personal narrative that traces the trajectory of desire. In Stewart's account, any material connection to a primal scene of memory is neces sarily effac effaced ed in the narration of a supposed suppos ed connection connec tion to the remembe re membered red scene: a narration inward, toward th e self. B Byy contrast, contra st, I argue that the t he sou venir maintains a thread of connec tion to to the scene it remembers, rememb ers, of material connection and it is precisely in this materiality, not in its willful forgetting, that the souvenir's significance lies. 7 Scholars have greeted digital imaging technologies technolog ies as the final final severance severan ce betw be twee eenn the t he image and an d its mat m ater eria iall refe r eferen rent, t, as thes th esee images imag es may m ay appe ap pear ar to index reality while being partially or entirely computer-generated (see, for example, Druckrey 1989, Mitchell 1994). While my argument here would not apply as strongly to a work shot on digital video, for example, I would suggest that the difference between digital and analog media is not as radi cal as many claim. Analog photography, film, and video have been used to simulate special effects since the inception of each medium; and many art ists use digital media as mu ch for their convenience convenie nce as for for their capacity ca pacity for for electronic alteration. Thus I believe it is more appropriate to talk about indexical dexical and nonindexical nonindexic al practices than tha n indexical and nonindexical nonindexic al media. 8 It would woul d be interesting intere sting to compare comp are this exchange in Madame 1'eau to the scenes in Granada TV's The Kayapo: Out of the Forest by Michael Beckham (1989), where the Kayapo use traditional organizing and ritual tech niques to confront the Brazilian government and the World Bank. The two water-diverting objects objects in question (the windmi win dmill ll and an d the dam) have diff differ er ent sorts of commodity commodi ty status, in Appadura Appa durai's i's term, ter m, and different different powers powe rs as recollection-image, in Deleuze's term, and they operate differently as fetishes produced in the process of intercultural translation, which Pietz describes. 9 See Appiah App iah (1991) for for a humoro hum orous us yet scathing critique crit ique of the mutual mu tually ly sup s up portiv por tivee appr ap prop opri riat atio ionn of tra t radi diti tion onal al African art by Wester Wes ternn aesth ae sthet etic icss and an d Western investors. 10 I thank tha nk Bill Nichols for for mention ment ioning ing this t his film film to me. me . 11 Trippi's essay is in the flyer for the exhibition "Trade Routes" at the New Museum Mus eum in New York York in 1993. The exhibition, described as "an inquiry into the cultural consequences of the globalization of finance," included works that explore explore the patterns of cultural interpenetra int erpenetration, tion, commodificati commodification, on, and
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fetishism I have been bee n discussing discus sing here. he re. Thanks to Maren Stange for for bringing it to my attention. To say that Beharry does something like "give voice" to peasant rituals has the danger of suggesting that, below the apparent exoticism of Hindu culture cultur e in general, another, even more exotic/auth entic object object has been dis covered—a sort of fetishism en ahime. A number num ber of scholars have alerted us to the danger of fetishizing fetishizing lower-class lowe r-class "third "th ird world" women wome n as the most au then th enti ticc of them th em all: these incl in clud udee Chow (199 (1993) 3),, 112 112-1 -14; 4; Trinh (198 (1989) 9),, 79-117; 79-117; Spivak (199 (1990) 0),, 59-66 59- 66;; and Kaplan Kapl an (1997 (1997). ). of Ind Indian ian women's wome n's sensuality sensua lity is fascinatingly fascinatingly undon un donee in Fatima's 13 The cliche of Letter (1994) by British artist Alia Syed. The image consists exclusively of shots in Whitechapel Underground Station in east London. They are luminous and often barely recognizable, suggesting the faraway thoughts of the rider who reads the letter of the title. In Urdu and English voiceover, "Fatima" writes of an assassination—of foreign sailors by a group of women—which took place in Pakistan. The women enticed the men, sat them th em in soft soft chairs cha irs,, and an d offer offered ed rich ri ch biryani biry aniss whose who se "intoxicating "intoxica ting saff saffro ronn fragrance before you even eat it" assailed the senses of their guests. Then, she writes, the women pressed their breasts against the men's faces, over whelming them with the scent of jasmine from outside and musk from the pore po ress of their the ir skin. ski n. "They got wha w hatt they th ey deserved"—for deserved "—for the th e men me n only onl y real r eal ized at the last minute min ute that t hat they were not being seduced seduc ed but suffocate suffocated. d. The passe pa sseng ngers ers on the th e un unde derg rgro roun undd incl in clud udee a few other oth er Sout So uthh Asian Asi an wome wo men, n, one of whom glances at the camera as though in confirmation when Fatima writes that Pakistani immigrant women "recognize each other in reflections but b ut are afraid to look loo k at each ea ch o t h e r . . . immig im migra rant nt wom w omen en are all a ll in disguis di sguise." e." This stunning film offers South Asian women a fantasy of turning their "Oriental sensuality" into a weapon against their former colonizers, and by locating it in the subway uses this fantasy to forge a bond among women.
3. The Memory of Touch 1 These Thes e inc i nclu lude de Jona J onatha thann Crary (199 (1990, 0, 1994), 1994), Martin Mar tin Jay (19 (1993 93), ), John Tagg Tagg (1988), Allan Sekula (1986), and Paul Virilio (1994). 2 Psychoanalytic feminist critiques of visuality include inclu de those of of Luce Irigaray Irigaray (1985), Laura Mulvey (1974), Rosalind Krauss (1988), Mieke Bal (1991), Kaja Silverman (1992), Parveen Adams (1993), and many others. A more Foucauldian approach to the critique of visuality characterizes the work of Linda Williams (1989) and Lisa Cartwright (1994), for example. 3 Although Altho ugh these critiques still apply to ethnograph ethno graphic ic photography photogra phy and film film as it was traditionally practiced and is still practiced in popular varia tions a la National Geographic, it is important to note that anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers have been among the first to recognize these prob pr oble lems ms and an d devise dev ise altern alt ernati atives ves.. 4 For For example, example , one of Peirce's categories of of indexical signs, the rhematic
in cludes es mimetic mimet ic acts like a spontan spon taneou eouss cry—or cry—or,, for for indexical sinsign, includ
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example, a child's imitation of an airplane with her body—in which the sign directs attention to the object (fear, the airplane) that caused it (Peirce 1950,115).
o
5 The words subject and an d object app ropriate ate to the positions positi ons I am S object are not quite appropri describing, since subject tends ten ds to imply both bot h cogito cogito and ego, conceptio conc eptions ns of o the self that I reject here. Yet it would be awkward, linguistically and epis& temologicall temologically, y, to replac re placee subject with a bulky term like Heidegger Heidegger's 's Dasein *T3 or being-in-the-world. Instead I would wou ld like to blur blu r the meanings meanin gs of these thes e ® words, as I have indicated. 6 Oddly enough, Caillois Caillois is describing mimetic mim etic insects insec ts in this essay. essay. Insects are similarly laden with meaning (like so much pollen) for Deleuze and Guattari, who describe the mutual mimesis between a wasp and an orchid in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987 (1987,, 10). At the th e poin po intt wher wh eree they th ey meet, me et, the th e wasp wa sp and an d the th e orchi orc hidd gene ge nerat ratee codes cod es from each ea ch other on the basis of contact, rather than abstraction. Knowledge of the wasp by the orchid, and the orchid by the wasp, is brought about through a mutual touching rather than the distant coding of of vision. vision. Though this is a metaphor for knowledge and language production, it is a resolutely tactile one that consolidates Deleuze and Guattari's antipathy to simple linguistic determination. 7 Merleau-Ponty did revise this view in his later writings, writing s, which whi ch better ac ac knowledge the degree to which the senses are cultivated. 8 As D. N. Rodowick (1 (1991) points poin ts out, our ou r present pres ent audiovisual audiov isual cult c ulture ure pro pro duces images that exceed semiotic analysis. Rodowick proposes the term "the figural" for the incommensurable meeting of visible and expressible that defines the electronically circulating image. 9 An exception excep tion is is Peircean semiotics, which whi ch ranges signs along a contin con tinuu uum m betw be twee eenn embod emb odied ied and an d abstra abs tract. ct. 10 That this conception conce ption of subjectivity subjectivity is extended exten ded to a basis in hearing, for for example in Kaja Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror (1988), (1988), only perpetuates the notion that subjectivity is fundamentally alienated and disembodied. 11 Shaviro's quite particular notion of what it would be to have a tactile ex perie pe rienc ncee of film brin b rings gs to mind mi nd Alpho Alp hons nsoo Lingis's Lingis' s grue gr uesom somee atte at temp mptt at an embodied description of orgasm: "a breaking down into a mass of exposed organs, organs, secretions, striated striated muscles, systems turning into pu lp and a nd suscep susce p tibility" (198 (1985, 5, 56) 56).. These are markedly mark edly masculinist mascu linist notions notio ns of embod e mbodimen iment, t, in which the subject is shattered so violently only because it is so rigidly constituted in the first place. In Leo Bersani's not-entirely-metaphor, if the rectum is a grave, it is one only for a phallic subjectivity that cannot countenance being penetrated itself (Bersani 1988). 12 As Mike Hoolboom puts pu ts it in conve c onversati rsation. on. 13 Thanks Than ks to Randi Kleban Klebanoff off fo forr directing direc ting me to Berenson. Beren son. 14 Thanks Than ks to Paolo Cherch Che rchii Usai for for pointin poin tingg this thi s out. 15 Auerbach compared comp ared these rigid, symbolized figures figures to those on late-an lat e-antiqu tiquee
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sarcophagi (1953, 116), which are in turn comparable to the figures Riegl identifies in late-Roman metalwork. A thorough taxonomy of modes of tactility in cinema is being researched by Jennifer Jenn ifer Barker Bark er (in prog p rogress ress). ). See Marks (1997a) for a discussion of discussion of the deterioration of film and video and its consequences for identification. Gene Youngblood emphasizes that the video image is a physical presence insofar as it is constituted by a barrage of electrons: "On the most fun damental level electronic visualization refers to the video signal itself as a plastic medium, as the 'material' of electronic presence. . . . This isn't visual art or picture-making; it is the thing itself, the visible process of the electronic substance" (1987, 335). I push this assertion as far as possible in Marks (1999)The toy manufacturer Tyco has since manufactured a similar children's video camera. In Levinas's view, the erotic is constituted by the absolute alterity of the other, the fact that th at we can never come co me into contac co ntactt with wi th it. This diff differs ers from from the phenomenological view that I have adopted, which understands there to be a continuum between the self and the world. See Vasseleu (1998) for a rigorous, if parchingly dry, comparison of the self-other relationship in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. I explore the erotic quality of haptic imagery in more detail in Marks (1998). Haptic visuality does have some of the qualities of Gaylyn Studlar's (1988) theory of masochistic identification. Studlar describes a kind of spectatorship in which whi ch the th e film film viewer gives gives himself or herself over to an entire enti re scene, scene , sometimes literally a shimmering surface (as in the Dietrich-von Sternburg spectacles), rather than identifying with characters. Desire in such a space operates operat es differently differently tha t hann in solely optical visuality, visuality, since it is not limited limite d to the operations of identification.
4. The Memory of the Senses 1 Smell knowledge knowled ge is vestigial bu butt persistent persi stent,, and so are its its footnotes. footnotes. In a footnote, Horkheimer and Adorno refer to a footnote by WilamowitzMoellen Moellendorf dorff, f, in turn tu rn citing another anothe r scholar, which whi ch "surprisingly indicates indicate s the connection between the concept of snuffling and that of the noos, au tonomous tonomou s reason: 'Schwyzer has quite convincingly related noos noos to snorting and snuffling' snuffling' Of course cou rse Wilamowitz Wilamo witz does no nott claim that tha t the th e etymologi cal connection helps in elucidating the meaning" (1972, 7111). 2 Recent research researc h suggests suggests that tha t touch tou ch is processed proce ssed partly in the limbic system (Bonda, Petrides, and Evans 1996): this suggests that touch has a similar, bu t weaker wea ker,, conn co nnec ecti tion on with wi th memory. mem ory. 3 For For more on how art and cinema cin ema can represent repre sent olfactory olfactory experience, experi ence, see Drobnick (1998) and Marks (1997b). 4 These include Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott
(199 (1994L 4L E. Valentin Vale ntinee Daniel Danie l (1994), (1994), David Howes How es (1991 (1991), ), Joel C. Kuipe Kui pers rs (1994), Vishvajit Pandya (1993), Sylvain Pinard (1990), Ian Ritchie (1990), C. Nadia Seremetakis (1994), Paul Stoller (1989), and Anthony Synnott (199 (1991) 1).. Also see Alain Ala in Corbin Corb in (1986). (1986). 5 Science Scien ce fiction, such su ch as the th e novels nove ls of William Gibson and an d Pat Cadigan Cadig an (in whose Synners [19 19991] a stun st untt actor act or reco re cords rds herself hers elf falling off a cliff cliff)) and Kathryn Bigelow's movie Strange Days (199 (1995) 5),, posits ways that tha t sensory experience experien ce can be "reproduc "repr oduced" ed" by recording record ing the sensations sensa tions of an "actor" and playing them the m back via direct neural neu ral stimulatio stimu lationn to the th e "viewer "viewer." ." What is interesting is how, in order to capture the multisensory effects of these fictitious technologies, these works must resort to verbal descriptions. 6 As my colleague colleagu e Charles Charle s O'Brien tells tell s me. me . 7 This implied implie d history of of the mimetic mimeti c relationshi relatio nshipp can be expand exp anded. ed. Both Auerbach and Riegl described the history of representational technologies as histories of the creatio c reationn of parallel paral lel worlds of signs, signs, which whi ch nneed eeded ed to shed their mimetic traces of the world before they could be refashioned. This proce pro cess ss of incre in creasi asing ng abstr ab stract action ion has ha s been be en extre ex treme mely ly part pa rtia iall and an d un unev even en:: for example, Hebrew mystical scholars recognized a mimetic power in the sacred words themselves, while Greek scribes adapted the Hebrew alephbeth to an abstract and disembodied written alphabet (Abram 1996, 245-55; see also Buck-Morss 1989). Western idealist philosophy, perhaps reaching its apex in Kant's positing that time and space were absolute categories, valued the increasing increa sing distance dista nce of symbolic systems fro from m the th e world that bred b red them. Mimetic thought, and mimetic works that invited a bodily relation ship between spectator/reader spec tator/reader and object object,, continued continu ed to be produced prod uced during the long history of Western idealism, but often in minor traditions. When twentieth-century critics such as Benjamin and Merleau-Ponty sought and found the traces of mimetic relationships in symbolic systems, they identi fied a mimesis that had been there all along. And when we look to cultures that have have nur nurtur tured ed mimetic and sensuou s relationships to the world instead of or alongside more abstract representational traditions, we may recognize commonalities with relationships that have, until recently, been deemed insignificant in Western culture. 8 For For example, exampl e, Stan Brakhage's critique critiqu e of of the apparatu appa ratuss pinpoin pinp ointed ted its cul tural bias bias for for a particular kind ki nd of embodied pe rception, rceptio n, that of nine teenthteenth century Europe, and its naturalization of that bias as the standard of all subsequent filmmaking (1963, n.p.). Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino sharpened Brakhage's comments on the dictatorial nature of film speeds and stocks, attacking the audiovisual conventions of Hollywood cinema's speed, film gauge, lighting, and conditions of exhibition for representing not only a European but a capitalist point of view (1983, 51). Brakhage's observation that film is gauged for white skin (the "peachy skins" of salon painti pai nting) ng) has ha s also bee b eenn shar sh arpe pene nedd by the th e urgency urge ncy,, desc de scri ribe bedd by many ma ny film film makers and videomake vide omakers, rs, to find find th thee combinati combi nation on of film film stock and lighting that can respect the many tonal varieties of darker skins.
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9 Erika Muha Mu hamm mmad ad [in progress] progres s] examin exa mines es the th e work of Jones and an d other Afri Afri can diasporic artists working in interactive media. 10 I bo borro rrow w the term from science scie nce fiction writer writ er Cadigan (1991 (1991), ), who projects a future in which whi ch every channe cha nnell on the television will play porn—news porn, porn , sports porn, porn , food food porn, porn , po porn rn porn, porn , etc. The science fiction fiction here is that, in
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a future of accelerating accelerat ing visuality, all represen repr esentat tation ion is voyeurism. Cadigan's Cadigan's imagined imagi ned future epitomizes epito mizes Marx's argument argu ment that, in a society society organized around arou nd property relations, vision is conceived as possession. possession. 11 Early Christians Christian s opposed oppo sed the use of incense inc ense in the church, chu rch, on the rationale that tha t the "base" senses have no role in spiritual spiritu al life. life. The Syrian scholar Arno bius bi us argue ar guedd that th at "if "if the gods are inco in corp rpor orea eal, l, od odou ours rs and an d perfu p erfumes mes can ca n have h ave no effect at all on them," since corporeal substances can have no effect on incorporeal beings (Stoddart 1990, 180). Although, as D. Michael Stoddart writes, incense was accepted accepte d into Christian ritual in the fourth fourth century ce ntury C.E. under Emperor Constantine, Christian queasiness about its use continued as Christian philosophers refined their theories of dualism. Thomas Aqui nas argued that taste and smell can have no part in beauty and thus cannot appeal to God, Who is beauty itself. "Those senses chiefly regard the beau tiful, which are the most cognitive, viz., sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the other objects of the senses, we do not use the expression for we do not speak spea k ooff beautiful tastes, and beautiful odours" o dours" beautiful, for (quoted in Campbell 1996,168).
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Jay, Martin. 1993a. Downcast Eyes. Berkeley: University of California Press. • 1993b. "Unsympathetic Magic." Review of The Nervous System and Mimesis and Alterity by Michael Taussig. Visual Anthropology Review 9:2 (Fall). 79-82. . 1994. "Martin Jay Replies to Michael Taussig and Paul Stoller." Visual Anthropology Review 10:1 (Spring). 163-64. Johnson, Avril, and Lina Gopaul. 1994. Interview with the author. May 3. Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer, eds. 1988. "The Last 'Special Issue' on Race?" Special issue of Screen 29:4. Kandinsky, Wassily. [1938] 1968. "Concrete Art." In Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp. Berkeley: University of California Press. 346-62. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1997. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process." In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 64-94. Krauss, Rosalind. 1991. "Using Language to Do Business as Usual." In Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. New York: Polity Press/Harper Collins. 79-94. Kuipers, Joel C. 1994. "Matters of Taste in Weweya." In Howes, Varieties of Sensory Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 111-27. Lant, Antonia. 1995. "Haptical Cinema." October 75 (Fall): 45-73. Lastra, James. 1997. "From the Captured Moment to the Cinematic Image: A Transformation in Pictorial Order." In The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew, with Sally Shafto. Austin: University of Texas Press. 263-91. Leder, Drew. 1992. The Absent Body Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lejeira, Jacinto. 1996. "Scenario of the Untouchable Body." Trans. Brian Holmes. In "Touch in Contemporary Art," special issue of Public 13, ed. David Tomas. 32-47. Leung, Simon. 1995. "Squatting Through Violence." Documents (Spring/Sum mer): 92-101. Levin, David Michael, ed. 1993. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berke ley: University of California Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Collected Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. . 1989. "Time and the Other." Trans. Richard A. Cohen. In The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell. 37-58. Lingis, Alphonso. 1985. Libido: The French Existential Theories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MacDougall, David. 1994. "Whose Story Is It?" In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 1990-1994, ed. Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1994. 27-36. Marchessault, Janine, ed. 1995a. Mirror Machine: Video and Identity Toronto: YYZ/Center for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions.
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Filmography/Videography
Distributors are listed where known. Alambrista. Robert Young, U.S., 1978,110:00,16mm. Aletheia. Iran T. Kim-Trang, U.S., 1992, 20:00, video. GIV, VDB, V Tape. Ananas. Amos Gitai, France, 1984, 76:00,16mm. Anatomy of a Spring Roll. Paul Kwan and Arnold Iger, U.S., 1992, 56:00,
video. Filmakers Library, ITVS, VO. And Still I Rise. Ngozi Onwurah, U.K., 1995, 30:00,16mm. WMM. . . . And the Word Was God. Ruby Truly, Canada, 1987,10:00, video. VO. Animaquiladora. Alex Rivera, U.S., 1997,10:00, video. VDB. The Attendant Isaac Julien, U.K., 1992, 8:00, 35mm. Frameline. Bangkok Bahrain. Amos Gitai, France, 1985, 78:00,16mm. Barrocco. Paul Leduc, Mexico, 1989,108:00,16mm. IFC. The Big Sleep. Seoungho Cho, U.S., 1992, 8:00, video. EAI. Bitter Strength: Sadistic Response Version. Azian Nurudin, U.S., 1992, 6:00, video. Frameline. "and they came riding into town on Black and Silver Horses." Lawrence Andrews, U.S., 1992, 30:00, video. VDB. Black Body. Thomas Allen Harris, U.S., 1992, 5:00, video. EAI, TWN. Black Is, Black Ain't. Marlon Riggs; co-produced by Nicole Atkinson, codirected by Christiane Badgley, 1995, 87:00, video. ITVS, Mongrel, NBPC. Bontoc Eulogy Marlon Fuentes, U.S., 1995, 70:00,16mm. California, Cinema Guild, ITVS. A Box of His Own. Yudi Sewraj, Canada, 1997, 20:00, video. VG, V Tape. Brasiconoscopio. Mauro Giuntini, Brazil, 1990,16:00, video. By the Thinnest Root. Richard Kim, U.S., 1995, 7:00,16mm. Calendar. Atom Egoyan, Armenia/Canada, 1993, 75:00,16mm. Alliance, Zeitgeist. Cannibal Tours. Dennis O'Rourke, Australia, 1988, 70:00,16mm. Direct. Changing Parts. Mona Hatoum, Lebanon, 1985, video, 24:00. VO, V Tape.
276
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Chasing the Dragon. Karen Kew and Ed Sinclair, Canada, 1993, 22:00, video.
V Tape. Chimera. Phil Hoffman, Canada, 1995,10:00,16mm. CFMDC. Chinaman's Peak: Walking the Mountain. Paul Wong, Canada, 1995, 25:00, video. VO. Chinese Characters. Richard Fung, Canada, 1986, 22:00, video. VDB, V Tape. Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat). Bill Viola, U.S., 1979, 28:00, video. EAI. Chronicle of a Disappearance. Elia Suleiman, Israel/Palestine, 1996, 88:00, 35mm. Aska, IFC, Mongrel. Converse. Reginald Woolery, U.S., 1992, 6:00, video. Corps etranger. Mona Hatoum, U.K., 1996, 24:00 loop, video installation. Alexander and Bonin, New York; White Cube, London. Cowtipping: The Militant Indian Waiter. Randy Redroad, U.S., 1992,17:00, video. TWN. Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green. Jalal Toufic, Lebanon/US., *995> 46:00, video. AFD. Daughters of the Dust. Julie Dash, U.S., 1992,113:00, 35mm. Kino. Deluge. Salem Mekuria, U.S., 1995, 60:00, video. TWN. Diastole. Ines Cardoso, Brazil, 1994, 4:30, video. Dreaming Rivers. Martine Attile, U.K., 1988, 30:00,16mm. WMM. Drive By Shoot. Portia Cobb, U.S., 1994,12:00, video. Drowning in Flames. Garine Torossian, Canada, 1994, 25:00,16mm. CFMDC. Ekleipsis. Tran T. Kim-Trang, U.S., 1998, 22:00, video. VDB, V Tape. El Diablo Nunca Duerme. Lourdes Portillo, US./Mexico, 1994, 87:00,16mm. ITVS, WMM. El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD. Guillermo Gomez-Pefia and IEAR Studios, U.S., 1995, 57:00, video. VDB. Encounter at the Intergalactic Cafe. Thomas Allen Harris, U.S., 1996,17:00, video. TWN. Ex-Voto. Tania Cypriano, U.S., 1990, 7:00, video. GIV, TWN. Family Viewing. Atom Egoyan, Canada, 1987, 86:00, 35mm. Far From You. Sami Al-Kassim, Egypt/US., 1996, 27:00,16mm. Sami Al-Kassim, phone: 510-763-4484. Email: [email protected] . Fatima's Letter. Alia Syed, U.K., 1994,12:00,16mm. London Film-makers' Co-op, 2-4 Hoxton Sq., London Nl 6N0 UK. Phone: 0171-684-2782. Email: [email protected] . Finagnon. Gary Kibbins, Canada, 1995, 70:00,16mm. V Tape. First World Order. Philip Mallory Jones, U.S., 1994, 28:oo, video. Also the title of a CD-ROM, in development. EAI, ITVS. Flow. Yau Ching, U.S., 1993, 38:00, video. EAI, VDB. Forever Jimmy! Nguyen Tan Hoang, U.S., 1996, 6:00, video. Frantz Fanon: White Skin, Black Mask. Isaac Julien, U.K. 1996, 52:00, 35mm. California.
Fresh Kill. Shu Lea Cheang, U.S., 1994, 80:00, 35mm. ITVS, WMM. Girl from Moush. Garine Torossian, Canada, 1993, 6:00,16mm. CFMDC. Good Hair, Pretty Hair, Curly Hair. Andrew Davis, Canada, 1991, 27:00,
16mm. CFMDC. The Good Woman of Bangkok. Dennis O'Rourke, Australia, 1992, 82:00,
16mm. Direct. Great Girl. Kim Su Theiler, 1994, U.S., 14:00,16 mm. WMM. The Gringo in Mananaland. Dee Dee Halleck, U.S., 1995, 60:00, video. Idera, VDB. Hairpiece: A Film for Nappyheaded People. Ayoka Chenzira, U.S., 1984, 10:00,16mm. TWN. Handsworth Songs. John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, U.K., 1986, 58:00,16mm. Mongrel, NBPC. He Who Crawls Silently Through the Grass with a Small Bow and One Bad Arrow Hunting for Enough Deer to Feed the Whole Tribe (trailer for Smoke Signals). Chris Eyre, U.S., 5:00, 35mm. TWN. Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Thomas Allen Harris, U.S./Canada, 1994, 26:00,
video. EAI, TWN. Her Sweetness Lingers. Shani Mootoo, Canada, 1994,12:00, video. VO,
V Tape, WMM. Hiroshima mon amour. Alain Resnais, France, 1959, 88:00, 35mm. History and Memory: ForAkiko and Takashige. Rea Tajiri, U.S., 1991, 30:00,
video. EAI, WMM. Homage by Assassination. Elia Suleiman, Nazareth/U.S., 1992, 28:00, 35mm.
IFC. Hopiit. Victor Masayesva Jr., U.S., 1982,12:00, video. EAI. I Blinked Three Times. Seoungho Cho, U.S., 1993,10:00, video. EAI. Identical Time. Seoungho Cho, U.S., 1997, 21:00, video. EAI. Igliniit. Philip Joamie, Canada, 1989-91, television program. IBC. Imagining Indians. Victor Masayesva Jr., U.S., 1994, 60:00; video. EAI, ITVS. In and Out of Africa. Lucien Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, U.S., 1992, 69:00,
video. India Hearts Beat. Leila Sujir, Canada, 1988,13:00, video. VO, Video Pool. Instant Dread. Dawn Wilkinson, Canada, 1998,13:00, 35mm. Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories. Steve Reinke,
Canada, 1993, 2:00, video. VG, V Tape. Island of Flowers. Jorge Furtado, Brazil, 1989, 5:00,16mm. First run. The Island with Striped Sky. Seoungho Cho and Sang-Wook Cho, U.S., 1993, 10:00, video. EAI. Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You? Yau Ching, U.S., 1991, 12:00, video. EAI, WMM. Itam Hakim Hopiit. Victor Masayesva Jr., U.S., 1985, 58:00, video. EAI. I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Inside. Roula Haj-Ismail, Lebanon, 1992,13:00, video. V Tape.
278
Jaguar. Jean Rouch, Senegal/France, 1971,16mm.
Jembe. Philip Mallory Jones, U.S., 1989, 3:00, video. EAI. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. Alanis Obomsawin, Canada, 1993,
^ 2 g
119:00,16mm. NFB.
The Kayapo: Out of the Forest. Michael Beckham, U.K., 1989,120:00,16mm. Khush. Pratibha Parmar, U.K., 1991, 24:00,16mm. WMM. nj Kippinguijauiit. Mosesie Kipanik, Canada, 1986-, television programs. IBC. ^ The Kitchen Blues. Charlene Gilbert, U.S., 1994,14:00, video. TWN. ^ Kore. Iran T. Kim-Trang, U.S., 1994,17:00, video. VDB, V Tape. kk The Last Angel of History. John Akomfrah, U.K., 1995, 45 :oo, 16mm. § Lebanon: Bits and Pieces. Olga Nakkas, France, 1994, video, 60 :oo. WMM. •rj Les maitres fous. Jean Rouch, Ghana/France, 1955, 35:00,16mm. Pleiade. Leylouna notre nuit. Yasmine Khlat, Canada, 1987, 52:00, video. GIV. Looking for Langston. Isaac Julien/Sankofa, U.K., 1989, 42:00,16mm. TWN. Love, Women and Flowers. Marta Rodriguez and Jorge Silva, Colombia, 1988,
58:00, video. WMM. Lulu. Srinivas Krishna, Canada, 1995,16mm. Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet. Raoul Peck, France/Germany/Switzerland, 1992, 69:00,16mm. California, Idera, Mongrel. Ma'loul fete sa destruction. Michel Khleifi, Palestine, 40:00,16mm. AFD. Madame l'eau. Jean Rouch, France, 1993,16mm. Pleiade. Maigre Dog. Donna James, Canada, 1990,10:00, video. AIM. Masala. Srinivas Krishna, Canada, 1991,105:00, 35mm. Alliance. Measures of Distance. Mona Hatoum, Lebanon/Canada, 1988,15:25, video. GIV, WMM, VO, V Tape. Memories from the Department of Amnesia. Janice Tanaka, U.S., 1990,12:50, video. V Tape, EAI, VDB. Memory/all echo. Yun-ah Hong, Korea, 1990, 27:00, video. WMM. Messin' Up God's Glory. Avril Johnson and Afua Namiley-Vlana, U.K., 1993, 10:00,16mm.
Meta Mayan II. Edin Velez, Guatemala/U.S., 1981, 20:00, video. EAI. Missing Lebanese Wars. Walid Ra'ad, U.S./Lebanon, 1996, 6:00, video. AFD, VO. Mississippi Masala. Mira Nair, U.S., 1991,113:00, 35mm. Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the end of an argument) Speaking for oneself. .. speaking for others. Jayce Salloum and Elia
Suleiman, Palestine/U.S./Canada, 1990, 43:00, video. AFD, HE, Idera, VG, VO, V Tape. My Beautiful Laundrette. Stephen Frears, U.K., 1985, 97:00, 35mm. My Mother's Place. Richard Fung, Canada, 1990, 49:00, video. Full Frame, VDB. Mysteries of July. Reece Auguiste, U.K., 1991, 60:00,16mm. NBPC. New View/New Eyes. Gitanjali, Canada/India, 1993, 50:00, video. V Tape. Note to a Stranger. Meena Nanji, U.S., 1992, 6:00, video.
Nunaqpa. Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada, 1991, 58:00, video. IIP,
V Tape. Nunavut. Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada, 1995,13 30:00 episodes,
video. IIP, V Tape. Ocularis: Eye Surrogates. Tran T. Kim-Trarig, U.S., 1997, 21:00, video. V Tape, VDB. Operculum. Tran T. Kim-Trang, U.S., 1993,14:00, video. V Tape, VDB. Papapapd. Alex Rivera, U.S., 1996, 28:00, video. VDB.
The Passion of Remembrance. Maureen Blackwood and Isaac
Julien/Sankofa, U.K., 1986, 80:00,16mm. WMM. People and the Land. Tom Hayes, U.S., 1996, 56:00, video. ITVS. The Perfumed Nightmare. Kidlat Tahimik, Philippines, 1978, 91:00,16mm. CFMDC, Flower. Petit a petit. Jean Rouch, Senegal/France, 1969,16mm. Pleiade. Qaggig. Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada, 1989, 58:00, video. IIP, V Tape. Quartier Mozart. Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Cameroon, 1992, 80:00, 35mm. Idem, California. Reassemblage. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Senegal/U.S., 1982, 40:00,16mm. TWN, WMM. Remembering Wei Yi-feng, Remembering Myself: An Autobiography. Yvonne Wellbon, U.S., 1995, 29:00, video. TWN, WMM. Ritual Clowns. Victor Masayesva Jr., U.S., 1988,18:00, video. EAI. Saar. Selina Williams, 1994, Canada, 28:00,16mm. WMM. Saddam Speaks. Jon Alpert, U.S., 1993,18:00, video. VO. The Salt Mines. Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio, U.S., 1990, 47:00, video. Frameline. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Stephen Frears, 100:00, U.K., 1986, 35mm. Sankofa. Haile Gerima, U.S./Germany/Ghana/BurkinaFaso, 1993,125:00, 35mm. Negod Gwad Productions, 48 Q St. NE, Washington, D.C. 20002. Phone: 202-529-0220. Fax: 202-526-6855. Sans soleil. Chris Marker, France, 1982,100:00,16mm. Argos. Saputi. Igloolik Isuma Productions, Canada, 1994, 30:00, video. IIP, V Tape. Sari Red. Pratibha Parmar, U.K., 1991,12:00, video. WMM, V Tape. The Scent of Green Papaya. Tran Anh Hung, France/Vietnam, 1994,104:00, 35mm. The Search for Peking Dog. Jon Choi, U.S., 1995, video. Secrets in the Open Sea. Walid Ra'ad, U.S., 1997, 6:00, video. AFD, VO. Seeing Is Believing. Shauna Beharry, Canada, 1991, 7:00, video. GIV. Seven Songs for Malcolm X. John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, U.K., 1993, 52:00,16mm. First, Mongrel, NBPC. Shoah. Claude Lanzmann, Poland/France, 1985, 273:00 and 290:00,16mm. Viewfinders. Shoot for the Contents. Trinh T. Minh-ha, U.S., 1991,101:00,16mm. WMM. SinarDurjana (Wicked Radiance). Azian Nurudin, U.S., 1992, 5:00, video. Frameline.
280
Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms. Victor Masayesva Jr., U.S., 1991, 28:00, video.
EAI. Skin Deep. Midi Onodera, Canada, 1995, 85:00,16mm. WMM. Slanted Vision. Ming-Yuen S. Ma, Canada/US., 1995, 50:00, video. TWN, VO, V Tape. DO
g JS " ^ O^
kk § •rj
r
Slowly This. Arthur Jafa, U.S., 1995, 30:00, video. TWN. Smoke Signals. Chris Eyre, U.S., 1998, 88:00, 35mm. Sniff. Ming-Yuen S. Ma, U.S., 1996, 5:00, video. VO, V Tape. Some Divine Wind. Roddy Bogawa, U.S., 1991, 72:00,16mm. TWN. Species in Danger Ed. Portia Cobb, U.S., 1989,13:00, video. Splash. Thomas Allen Harris, U.S., 1991,10:00, video. EAI, TWN. Strawberry Fields. Rea Tajiri, U.S., 1997, 86:30,16mm. Phaedra Cinema, 5455 Wilshire, Ste. 1403, Los Angeles, Calif. 90036. Phone: 213-938-9610. Email: [email protected] . Super Shamou. Barney Pattunguyak, Canada, 1990-94, 3 episodes, television
program. Full Frame. Surname Viet Given Name Nam. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Vietnam/US., 1989,
108:00,16mm. WMM. Takuginai. Blandina Makkik, Leetia Ineak, Canada, 1987-, television program. IBC. Talaeen a Junuub (Up From the South). Jayce Salloum, Walid Ra'ad, 1993, 60:00, US./Canada, video. AFD, V Tape, VG, TWN. A Tale of Love. Trinh T. Minh-ha, U.S., 1995, 35mm. WMM. Testament. John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, U.K., 1988,16mm. NBPC. This Is Not Beirut (There Was and There Was Not). Jayce Salloum, Lebanon/ Canada, 1994, 48:00, video. AFD, V Tape, VG. Through the Milky Way Yun-ah Hong, Korea, 1992,19:00, video. WMM. Toe Storee. Ming-Yuen S. Ma, U.S., 1993, 21:00, video. TWN, VO, V Tape. The Trained Chinese Tongue. Laurie Wen, U.S., 1994, 20:00,16mm. WMM. Twilight City. Reece Auguiste, U.K., 1989, 60:00,16mm. NBPC. Two Lies. Pam Tom, U.S., 1989, 25:00,16mm. WMM. Un Chien Delicieux. Ken Feingold, U.S., 1991, video, 18:45. EAI. Underexposed: The Temple of the Fetus. Kathy High, U.S., 1992, 72:00, video. WMM. Unsere Afrikareise. Peter Kubelka, Austria, 1961-66,12:30,16mm. Canyon. Video Letters 1-3. Yau Ching, U.S., 1993, 0:38, 3:20, and 5:20, video. EAI. Videobook. Beverly Singer, U.S., 1995, 5:00, video. EAI. Vintage: Families of Value. Thomas Allen Harris, U.S., 1995, 72:00,16mm. TWN. Visions. Garine Torossian, Canada, 1992, 4:00,16mm. CFMDC. Wassa. Philip Mallory Jones, U.S., 1989, 3:00, video. EAI. water into fire. Zachery Longboy, Canada, 1993,10:30, video. V Tape. The Watermelon Woman. Cheryl Dunye, U.S., 1996, 90:00,16mm. First Kino.
Water Ritual #1: An Urban Site of Purification. 1990,
Bar bar a Mc Cu ll ou gh , U.S.,
281
4:0 0,1 6mm . TWN.
The Way to My Father's
Village. Ric hard Fung, Cana da, 1988, 38:00, video.
Full Fra me , VDB. What's the Difference
£ Between
a Yam and a Sweet Potato? Adr ien e Jenik an d
J. Ev an Du nl ap , U.S., 1992, 5:0 0, vi de o. EAI. Who Needs a Heart? John Akomf rah/ Blac k Aud io Film Collective, U.K., 1992, 80:00,16mm.
Janic e Tanak a, U.S., 1992,
58: 00, vi de o. EAI, VDB, V Tap e. A Woman Being in Asia. By un Young Joo, Korea, 1993, 60: 00, vi deo . Do cu Factory VISTA, 4th il., Kogu em Blag, 1535-9 , Seocho-3-Don g, Deo chu -Gu, Seoul, Korea. Fax: 011-82-2-5975365. Woman Sesame Oil Maker aka Women from the Lake of Scented Souls. Xie Fei, Chin a/Ho ng Kong/Japan, 1993,105:00, 35mm. A Woman Waiting for Her Period. Wei-Ssu Chien , Taiwan/ U.S., 1993, 23:00, video. WMM. Women and Men Are Good Dancers. Arle ne Bowm an, Canada/U. S., 1995, 40:00, video. TWN, V Tape. Work in Progress. Luis Valdovino, U.S., 1990, 14:00 , vide o. TWN.
Distributors AFD Ara b Fil m Dis tri but ion , 2417 10th Ave. E., Seat tle , Wash . 98102. Ph on e: 206-322-0882. Fax: 206-322-4586. Email: [email protected] All ian ce
com.
All ian ce Rele asing , 121 Bloor St. E., ste. 1500, Toro nto , ON M 4 W
Can ada . Ph on e: 416-967-1174. Fax: 416-967-588 4. Argos Argos Films, 4, ru e Edoua rd-Nort ier, Neuilly- sur-S eine 92, France . Ask a Ask a Fil m Dis tri but ion , 1600. De Lori mer, bur. 211, Mo nt re al , P Q H2K 3M5,
3W5,
o
QFQ
jg p^
Who's Gonna Pay For These Donuts Anyway?
www. arabfilm.
Q
Can ada . Ph on e: 514-521-0623. Fax: 514-521-6174. Ema il: askafilm
@login.net.
California Reso luti on Inc./Cal ifornia Newsreel , 149 Ni nt h St., San Francisco, Calif. 94103. Phone: 415-621-6196. CFMDC Can ad ian Fil mma ker s Dist ribu tio n Cen tre, 37 Ha nn a St., ste. 220, Toronto, ON M6K1W8, Canada. Phone: 416-588-0725. Fax: 416-588-7956. Internet: www.cfmdc.org. Ci ne ma Gui ld 1697 Broad way, Ne w York, N.Y 10019. Ph on e: 212-246-5522/ 800-723-5522. Fax: 212-246-5525. Direct Direct Cin ema Ltd., POB 10003, San ta Mon ica , Calif. 90410. Phone: 310-636-8200. Fax: 310-636-8228. Email: [email protected]. EAI Ele ctr oni c Art s In te rm ix , 542 W. 22n d St., Ne w York, N.Y. 10011. Phone: 212-337-0680. Fax: 212-337-0697. Int ern et : www.eai.org. Fi lm ak er s Lib rar y 124 E. 40 th St., Ne w York, N.Y. 10016. Ph on e: 212-808-4980. Fax: 212-808-4983. Email: [email protected].
pL
0 S ff
282
First First Run/Icarus, 153 Waverly PL, New York, N.Y. 10014. Phone: 800876-1710. Fax: 212-255-7923. Email: [email protected]. Internet: www.frif.com
& 2
Flower
Flower Films, 10341 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito, Calif. 94530. Phone:
510-525-0942.
DO
g 3 ^ OJ
gfc § •£
Full Fra me
Full Fra me Fil m a n d Video, 517 College St., ste. 325, Toronto, ON M6G 4A2, Canada. Phone: 416-925-9338. Fax: 416-324-8268 . Frameline 34 6 N i n t h St., San Francisco, Calif. 94103. Phone: 415-703-8564. Fax: 415-861-1404. Email: [email protected]. GIV Grou pe Inte rvent ion Video, 5505, Boul. St-Laurent, Montrea l, P Q H2T 1S6, Canada. Phone: 514-271-5506. Fax: 514-271-6980. Ema il : [email protected]. HE Heu re Exquise , BP113, Mons e n Barouel, France 59370. Phone: 33-20-04-95-74. Idera Idera Films, 1037 W. Broad way # 400, Vancouver, B.C. V6H1 E3. Phone: 604-738-8815. Fax: 604-738-8400. Email : [email protected] . IBC Inui t Broad cast ing Corpo ratio n, 703-251 Laurier Ave. W., Ottawa, ON KIP 5J6, Canada. Phone: 613-235-1892. Fax: 613-230-8824. IFC Intern ation al Film Circui t/Plan et Pictures, P.O. Box 1151, Old Chelsea Stn., N e w York, N.Y. 10011. Pho ne: 212-779-0660. Fax: 212-779-9129. Email: Ifcplanet@aol.
com.
IIP Igloolik Isu ma Produ ctio ns, P.O. Bo x 223, Igloolik, Nun avu t, XOA 0L0, Canada. Phone: 819-934-8809. Fax: 819-934-8700. ITVS Ind ep en de nt Television Service, PO B 78008, San Francisco, Calif. 94107. Phone: 415-356-8383. Fax: 415-356-8391. Emai l: [email protected].
Internet: www.itvs.org. Kino Kino International, 333 W. 39th St., #503, New York, N.Y. 10018. Phone: 212-629-6880. Fax: 212-714-0871. Mongrel Mongrel Media, POB 68547, 360A Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 3J2, Canada. Phone: 416-516-9775. Fax: 416-516-0651. Outside Canada: Phone: 888-607-FILM. Email: [email protected]. NAATA National Asian American Television Association, 346 Ninth St., San Francisco, Calif. 94103. Phone: 415-552-9550. Fax: 415-863-7428. NBPC National Black Programming Consortium, 761 Oak St., ste. A, Columbus, Ohio 43205. Phone: 614-229-4399. Fax: 614-229-4398. New Yorker New Yorker Films, 16 W. 61st St., New York, N.Y. 10023. Phone: 212-247-6110. Fax: 212-307-7855. NFB National Film Board of Canada, 3155, rue C6te-de-Liesse, St. Laurent, PQ, Canada H4N 2N4. Phone: 800-267-7710. Internet: www.nfb.ca. Pleiade Films de la Pleiade [address to be added in proof] TWN Third World Newsreel, 335 W. 38th St., New York, N.Y 10018. Phone: 212-947-9277. Fax: 212-594-6917. Email: [email protected]. VDB Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 112 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, II. 60603. Phone: 312-345-3550. Fax: 312-541-8073. VG Videographe, 460, rue Ste-Catherine ouest #504, Montreal, PQ H3B
1A7, Canada. Phone: 514-866-4720. Fax: 514-866-4725. Email: [email protected]. Video Pool 100 Arthur St. #300, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1H3, Canada. Phone: 204-949-9134. Fax: 204-942-1555. Viewfinders Box 1555, Evanston, II. 60204. VO Video Out, 1965 Main St., Vancouver, BC V5T 3Cl, Canada. Phone: 604-872-8449. Fax: 604-876-1185. Email: [email protected]. V Tape 401 Richmond St. W, ste. 452, Toronto, ON M5V 3A8, Canada. Phone: 416-351-1317. Fax: 416-351-1509. Email: [email protected] . Internet: www.vtape.org. WMM Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway, ste. 500R, New York, N.Y. 10012. Phone: 212-925-0606. Fax: 212-925-2052. Email: [email protected] Zeitgeist Zeitgeist Films, 247 Centre St., 2nd fl., New York, N.Y. 10013. Phone: 212-274-1989. Fax: 212-274-1644. Email: [email protected].
Index
Abram, David, 214
senses, 206-208, 240; and theo
"Absent body," 132
ries of exchange, 95-96. See also
Adams, Parveen, 188, 254 n2
Ethnographic film
Adorno, Theodor W., 121,191; and fetish, 88; and mimesis, 139-14 0,143
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 27, 61, 63;
Blow-Up, 172
Affection-image, 28
"Any-spaces-whatever," 27-28, 73,163
Ahmad, Aijaz, 8
Apak, Paul, 16. See also Igloolik Isuma Productions
AIDS,172,213
Aiken, Susana: The Salt Mines, 252 ni
Aparicio, Carlos: The Salt Mines, 252 ni
Akomfrah, John, 10, 66-67; Hands-
Apartheid, 1, 9
worth Songs, 11-12, 25, 29, 49, 71,
Appadurai, Arjun, 95-97
134,153, 226, 250 n6; The Last Angel
Aquinas, Thomas, 258 nil
of History, 89; Seven Songs for Mal colm X, 25, 67; Testament, 25,134; Who Needs a Heart?, 25, 31-32, 3637, 47-48, 68, 71-72, 74, 76,134, 200. Se e also Black Audio Film Col
lective
Arabian Nights, The, 56, 232 Arasoughly, Alia, 169 Arau, Alfonso: Like Water for Choco
late, 212 Archaeology, cinema as, 5, 8, 24-25, 28- 40, 65, 77, 81, 97,115,13 4. See also
Alambrista, 252 ni Aletheia. See "Blindness Series" Al-Kassim, Sami: Far From You, 156, 232
Fossil "Ashes to Flowers: The Breathing," 114-119,125-126
Attendant,
The, 251 n5
Alpers, Svetlana, 169
Attentive recognition, 48,147
Alpert, Jon: Saddam Speaks, 56
Attile, Martine: Dreaming Rivers, 81-82
Ananas, 97
Audience. See Spectatorship
Anatomy of a Spring Roll, 235
Audiovisual med ia, xv, xvii; audio
Andrew, Dudley, 26
visual culture, 214-215; and audio/
Andrews, Lawrence: "and they came
visual disjunction, 30-31, 34, 36-37,
riding into town on Black and Silver
72-73; and expressibility of non-
horses," 177
audiovisual senses, xvi, 2, 5, 71,
And Still I Rise, 209-210 . . . And the Word Was God, 220
198, 210-211, 214, 222-224, 230-231, 243; technology of, 210-221 [see
Angele, 212 Animaquiladora,
76, 83-84,111,114,127-131,194-
252 ni
Anthropology, 80, 86,138,152; of the
also Film; Video). See also Sound; Vision/visuality
286
CD
rt
Aue rba ch, Erich: an d figurative re p resen tati on, 167; and mime sis, 138, 257 n7 Auguist e, Reece: Mysteries of July, 25, 74,196-197; Twilight City, 25, 134. See also Black Audio Film Col lective Aura, 20-21,174; auratic object, 80-81, 94,101,120-122,124; in Benjamin, 80-81,140; and fetish, 81,120; in Marx, 80-81 Aura, 172
Aust en, Jane, 223 Axel, Gabriel: Babette's Feast, 212 Bad Aboriginal Art, 2.52.114
Bal, Mieke, 169-170, 254 n2 Balasz, Bela, 93-94,120,171 Bambara, Toni Cade, 19, 21, 224-225 Banff Centre for the Arts, 10 Bangkok Bahrain, 252 ni Barbash, Ilisa: In and Out of Africa, 101-102,123
Baudrillard, Jean, 121 Bazin, Andre, 21, 92 Beckham, Michael: The Kayapo: Out of the Forest, 253 n8
image, 40, 73; and memory, 63- 64, 142,146-147; and perception, 4142, 48, 62,146-147,150,152,162, 165, 202; and recollection-i mage, 40, 50-51 Bersani, Leo, 255 nil Bhabha, Homi K., 85, 89, 249 ni Bigelow, Kathryn: Blue Steel, 151; Strange Days, 257 ns Bitter Strength: Sadistic Version, 176
Besponse
Black Audio Film Collective, 10-11,16, 25, 36, 65, 67-68,134-135,196, 226. See also Akomfrah; Auguiste Black Body, 251 ns Black Is, Black Ain't, 110, 225 Blackwood, Maureen : The Passion of Bemembrance, 12, 25,134
"Blindness Series," 137-138 Blow-Up, 172 Blue Steel, 151
Body without organs, 122-123 Boltanski, Christian, 50 Bontoc Eulogy, 25, 32, 51-53, 56, 65-66, 69, 71, 74-76,153 Box of His Own, A, 233-234
Brakhage, Sta n, 201, 257 n8
Beharry, Shauna, 17, 79,125-126; "Ashes Brasiconoscopio, 178 to Flowers: The Breathing," 114-119, Brecht, Bertolt, 121,183-184 125-126; Seeing Is Believing, xi, 22, Bresson, Robert: Pickpocket, 171 75, 78, 90,112-113,115-118,120,124, Bricoleur, 88-89 127-129,153,160-161,187-188, 201, Brixton riots, 11, 29, 250 n6 Buck-Morss, Susan, 88,143,145,170, 237 Bekolo, Jean-Pierre: Quartier Mozart, 201 Burch, Noel: and haptic cinema, 17099 171 Benjamin, Walter, 27,138,171, 221; and Burnett, Ron, 175 aura, 80-81,140; and Deleuze, 80; By the Thinnest Boot, 236 and dialect ical image, 51, 88, 97; Byu n Young Joo: A Woman Being in and fetish, 21, 86; and fossil, 85; and Asia, 252 ni Marxism, 80-81, 86,121; and mem ory, 64; and mimesis, 138,140-143, Cadigan, Pat, 257 ns, 258 nio 214, 257 n7; and sen suo us similarity, Caillois, Roger, 141 140; and storytelling, 70 Calendar, 25, 31, 39-41, 48-4 9, 65-66, Bensmaia, Reda, 251 ni Berenson, Bernard, 165 71-72, 75-76,153,172,174-175 Bergson, Henri, xiv, 26-27, 80,139; an d Campion, Jane: The Piano, 172 attentive recognition, 48,147; and Canada Council for the Arts, 13-14 Deleuze, 62-63, 80,147-148, 212; Cannibal Tours, 101 and duration/ duree, 40, 62-63; and Capital/capitalism, 9, 51, 79, 85, 87,
95-100,131, i39 _ 1 40,143. See also Commodity Cardoso, Ines: Diastole, 191-192 Casino, 177 Changing Parts, 155-156 Chasing the Dragon, 236 Cheang, Shu Lea, 5,17; Fresh Kill, 15, 236 Chenzira, Ayoka: Hairpiece: A Film for Nappyheaded People, 224 Chien andalou, Un, 151 Chimera, 178 Chinaman's Peak: Walking the Moun tain, 74 Chinese Characters, 20 Ching, Yau: Flow, 136, 235-236; 7s There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You?, 136; Video Letters, 176 Cho, Sang-Wook: The Island with Striped Sky, 178-179 Cho, Seoungho, xv, 62,160,181,189; I Blinked Three Times, 43; Identi cal Time, 179-181; The Island with Striped Sky, 178-179 Choi, John: The Search for Peking Dog, 236 Chott el-Djerid, 178 Chronicle of a Disappearance, 15, 25, 60 Cinema, xii, 5- 6, 97, 247; cere moni al, 73-74; "cinema of attractions," 170; cinema-going, 6, 211-212; as fetish, 21-22, 92-94 ,124-1 25; "guerrilla cinema," 13; haptic, 159, 164,1 70182,185,190; hybrid, 27, 249 m; "imperfect cinema," 6,10, 249 ni; independent, 14-15; as mimetic, xvii, 22,145,151,164,190,196, 214-221; movement-image cinema, 27, 36, 42, 213; multisensory, xiv, 22,195-196, 212, 230-231, 242; political, 55-5 6; Third Cinema, 6,11, 249 ni; timeimage cine ma, xiv, 27-28, 42,12 9,131, 163; transnational, 6-7, 78, 249 ni. See also Film; Intercultural cinema; Video Citizen Kane, 78
Classen, Constance, 115,117, 207-208, 256 n4
Close-up, 93-94,172,176 Cobb, Portia: Drive By Shoot, 177; Species in Danger Ed, 177
Cognitive science, xiii, 22, 202, 205. See also Varela Cohn, Norman. See Igloolik Isuma Productions Colonialis m, xii, 8-9 , 25, 27, 55, 8 6 90, 95-96,100-101,123,164, 230, 232, 239-240; of Africa, 44,102, 142; Canada, 34; colon figure, 102; colonial fetishism, 79, 85; colonial stereotypes, 89; double coloniza tion, 65-66; and slavery, 8. See also Postcolonialism Color (perception), 146, 203, 213 Commodity, 78, 88, 97-106,114; cornmodification of the senses, 239-245; commodifying gaze, 79; vs. gift, 80, 95-97; transnational, 97-102,104-106 Connerton, Paul, 199, 207 Corps Stranger, 156,189-190 Credits Included: a Video in Green and Red, 57,107,135, 232
Crimp, Douglas, 19 Cubitt, Sean, 46 Cypriano, Tania: Ex-Voto, 74 Daniel, E. Valentine, 207-208 Dash, Julie: Daughters of the Dust, xv,
3,15,19-21, 25, 71,110,153,196, 200, 215, 223-229,237 Davis, Andrew: Good Hair, Pretty Hair, Curly Hair, 224 De Brosses (Dutch explorer), 120 DeFreitas, Michael . See Michael X Deleu ze, Gilles, xiii-xiv , 26, 53, 60, 109,127; and actu al imag e, 40, 65; and affection-image, 28, 73-74, 94; and "any-spaces-whatever," 27-28, 73; and Benjamin, 80; and Bergson, 62-63, 80,147-148, 212; and body without organs, 122-123; a n d ceremo nial cinema, 74; and cinema theory, 28; and cliched image, 46; and crystal image, 65; and experimental body, 73; and faciality, 94; and fossil, 22, 80-81, 84-85, 91; and gaseous perc ept ion , 61; and Guattari, xiv, 28,122,138,168,
Deleuze [continued) 255 n6; and haptic cinema, 171; and haptic/optical image, xiv, 163; and intercessor, 68; and intercultural cinema, 26; and movement-image, 27, 42, 46,163,187; and mummy, 29; and nomad art, 168; and optical image, 30, 40, 46- 48 , 53, 63,131, 212; and perc eption, 62; and phe no menol og y, 150; and political cinema, 55-56; and powers of the false, 65-66; and pre se nt-t hat -p ass es , 40, 65; and recolle ction-ima ge, 37, 40, 50-51, 5 3 54, 77-78, 84, 97-98; and the seeable and the sayable, 30-31; and spiritual automat on, 251 ni ; and time-image, xiv, 27-28 , 42, 46, 62- 64 , 73-74,131, 177, 194; and vi rtual i mage, 40, 49 -50 , 65 Derrida, Jacques, 141-142 Descartes, Rene, 133,146 Devereaux, Leslie, 130-131, 201 Dialectical imag e, 51, 88, 97 Diaspora, x i, 1, 4, 8- 9, 11 , 78, 90,114, 196, 229 -238; African, 12-13, 67, 89, 110,153, 209-210, 215-216, 224, 226, 229; Asian, 209, 236; Chinese, 235; Indi an, 118; Midd le Ea stern, 57,156, 159,232-233 Diastole, igi-192 Doane, Mary Ann, 188 Docum entar y, xv, 8, 31, 52- 53, 6 8- 69 , 177,194,197, 234; as fetishistic, 7g, 124-125; and indexicality, 92-93,125, 253 mi; "reflexive documentary," 10. See also Ethnographic film Dreaming Rivers, 81-82 Drive By Shoot, 177 Drowning in Flames, 174 Dun lap , J. Evan: What's the Difference Between a Yam and a Sweet Potato?,
227 Dunye, Cheryl, 17; The Watermelon Woman, 25, 65 Duration/duree, 40, 62-63 Eat Drink Man Woman, 212, 235
Echehmeta, Buchi, 2og-2io Egoyan, Atom, 171; Calendar, 25, 31,
39-41, 48-49, 65-66, 71-72, 75-76, 153,172-175; Family Viewing, 172 Eisenstein, Sergei, 221-222 Ekleipsis. See "Blindness Series" El Diablo Nunca Duerma, 15 Electronic imaging, 169,175-177,182, 185-186,191, 253 n6; morphing, 216 El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD, 252 ni Embodiment: "absent body," 132; body without organs, 122-123; ceremonial body, 73-74; em bodie d kno wledg e, 118-119,142-143,156,159,195-201, 206-210, 221, 223-229 (see also Mi mesis); embodied language, 141-142; embodied memory, 73, 76,142,146147,152,157-159, 200, 202, 207-210, 228-229; embodied perception, xiixiii, 22,132,145-153,169-172,188190,193, 211, 213-215; an d tra uma, 152 Encounter at the Intergalactic Cafe,
251115 English Patient, The, 177, 231
Eroticism, 122,183-188,192-193, 256 n20 Espinosa, Julio Garcia, 10, 249 ni Essentialism, 138, 204-205, 216 Ethnographic film, 52,177, 216, 223, 227, 234, 239; critique of, 131,133-134,193, 230, 254 n3. See also Anthropology; Documentary Excess, xvii, 231, 249 n i Experimentation (in film and video), xii-xiii, 10, 61-62,173,176-177,184, 194,215 Ex-Voto, 74 Eyre, Chris: He Who Crawls
Silently Through the Grass with a Small Bow and One Bad Arrow Hunting for Enough Deer to Feed the Whole Tribe, 15-16; Smoke Signals, 15
Fabian, Johann es, 85 Faciality, 94 Family Viewing, 172 Far From Vietnam, 44 Far From You, 156, 232 Fatima's Letter, 254 ni3
Feingold, Ken: Un Chien Delicieux,
Foucault, Mi chel, 26, 29-3 0, 46, 55, 133,152, 254 ns; the seeable vs. the sayable, 30-31, 36,111 Frankfurt School, 139-140,143. See also Adorno; Benjamin
177 Feminism, 138,142,152; and critique of visuality, 133,160, 254 n2; female spectator s hip, 188; feminist film and video, xii, 4; women and sense Frantz Fanon: White Skin, Black Masks, pe rc ept ion , 118,169-170, 254 m.3; 251115 women's arts, 169,175 Frears, Stephen: My Beautiful LaunFetish/fetishism, 83, 85-94,115-116, drette, 3; Sammy and Bosie Get 119-120; and audi ovisual image, 114; Laid, 3 and aura, 81,119-122; in Benjamin, Fresh Kill, 15, 236 86; Catholic fetishism, 92; cinema Freud, Sigmund, 86 ,143, 169, 193, 203, as, 21-22, 92-94 ,124- 125; colonial 204 fetishism, 79, 85; commodity fetish Fuentes, Marlon, 67; Bontoc Eulogy, 25, ism, 86-87, 92> and culture, 66, 8732, 5i-53» 56, 65-66, 69-76,153 88,123; dissolution of, 122-126; and Fung, Richard: Chinese Characters, 20; documentary, 79,124-125; etymology My Mother's Place, 25; The Way to of, 86-87; and fossil, 77, 79-81, 86, My Father's Village, 25, 75 88-89, 92-93, 97,124; in Horkheimer Furtad o, Jorge: Island of Flowers, 98 and Adorno, 88; and intercul tural Fusco, Coco, 10 cinema, 85; "life cycle" of, 124; and memory, 86,177, 201, 253 n6 ; in Pietz, Gabriel, Tesh ome, 10, 27, 62; an d no ma d 86-88, 91,102,119,122-123,124-125; aesthetics, 11, 215, 216 and smell, 114 Gerima, Haile: Sankofa, 3,15 Getino, Octavio, 10, 249 ni, 257 n8; and Fielder, A. J. See Arthur Jafa "guerrilla cinema," 13 Figurative representation. See AuerGhianikian, Yervant, 212 bac h; Riegl "Ghosts of stories," 11, 29, 36, 250 n6 Film: deterioration of, 172; haptic, 172Gibson, William, 257 ns 175; skin of, xi-xii, 243. See also Gilbert, Charlene: The Kitchen Blues, Cinema 224 Finagnon, 83 Gilroy, Paul, 10,12-13 First Nations, 1, 8-9,1 16, 216-221, 250 Girl from Moush, 174 n4; Hopi, 37-39, 218-219; Inuit, 216 Gitai, Amos: Ananas, 97; Bangkok [see also Igloolik Isuma Produc tions); Mohawk (uprising at Oka), Bahrain, 252 ni 33-34. See also Eyre; Masayesva; Gitanjali: New View/New Eyes, 177-178 Obomsawin; Truly Giuntini, Mauro: Brasiconoscopio, 178 First World Order, 182, 216 Godard, Jean-Luc, 27, 35, 61; Far From Fisher, Jennifer, 169 Vietnam, 44 Gomez-Pefia, Guillermo, 37; El NaftazFlow, 136, 235-236 teca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD, Food. See Taste: food/cooking 252 m Forever Jimmy!, 20 Good Hair, Pretty Hair, Curly Hair, 224 Fossil, 51-53, 83, 84-85, 92,130; in Good Woman of Bangkok, The, 252 ni Benjamin, 85; cinema as, 22; in Great Girl, 110,120 Deleuze, 22, 80, 81, 84 -8 5, 91; and fetish, 8, 77> 79~8i, 86, 88-89, 92-93* Greenaway, Peter, 231 97,124; as indexical trace, 84, 92; and Griffin, Ada Gay, 18 Griffith, D. W.: Intolerance, 212 memory, 63; radioactiv e, 51-53, 70, Gringo in Mananaland, The, 15, 57 84,124, 247
Guattari, Felix, xiv, 28,138, 255 n6; and "body wit hou t organs," 122-123; a n d "nomad art," 168 Gunning, Tom, 170
Hiroshima mon amour, 134 History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, xi, 25, 31-33, 42-43* 50, 56, 6 4- 65 , 70, 72, 75-76, 78, 82-83,
Habe rmas , Jurgen, 121 Hagedorn, Jessica, 236
106-107,112,124,130 Hoang, Nguyen Tan: Forever Jimmy I', 20 Hoffman, Phil: Chimera, 178 Nappyheaded
Homage by Assassination,
Haj-Ismail, Roula, xv, 188; I Wet My
75 Hong, Yun-ah: Memory/all
Hairpiece: A Film for People, 224
Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Inside,
25, 59- 60,
echo, 25; Through the Milky Way, 25
hook s, bell, 225 Hopiit, 134,182 156-159*160, 232 Horkheimer, Max. See Adorno Hall, Stuart, 250 n6 Howes, David, 207-208, 223 Halleck, Dee Dee: The Gringo in Hybridity, 7, 249 ni; hybrid cinema, xii, Mananaland, 15, 57 6, 8, 27, 249 ni; hybrid culture, 160, Handsworth Songs, 11-12, 25, 29, 49, 71, 227-244 134,153, 226, 250 n6 Haptic: cinema, 159,164,170-182,185, I Blinked Three Times, 43 190; definition, 162; identification, 187-190; image {see Image: haptic); Identical Time, 179-181 sound as, xvi, 182-183; space, 166; Identification, 187-190; bodily, 198, 214 visuality, xi-xii, xiv, 22,129,151, (see also Mimesis); masochistic, 256 162-171,175-176,182-185,187-188, n22; narrative, 170-171,198, 213; in 190-191,193, 256 n22 optical image, 165-167 Harris, Thomas Allan: Black Body, 251 Identity, 4, 8; identity politics, 29, 55; spiritual identity, 104 ns ; Encounter at the Intergalactic Cafe, 251 ns; Heaven, Earth, and Hell, 251 ns ; Splash, 251 ns ; Vintage: Families of Value, 15 Hatoum, Mona, 4,17; Changing Parts, 155-156; Corps etranger, 156,189190; Measures of Distance, xi, 43,
113.153-156,177,187,188,190, 232, 237 Hayes, Tom: People and the Land, 56
Hearing. See Sound Hearn, Lafcadio, 221-222 Heaven, Earth, and Hell, 251 ns
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 167, 193 Her Sweetness Lingers, 148,185-188 He Who Crawls Silently Through the Grass with a Small Bow and One Bad Arrow Hunting for Enough Deer to Feed the Whole Tribe, 15-16 High, Kathy: Underexposed: The Temple of the Fetus, 252 ni Hildebrand, Adolf. See Riegl
Iger, Arnold: Anatomy of a Spring Roll,
235 Igliniit, 16
Igloolik Isuma Productions, 16, 37; Nunaqpa, 216; Nunavut (television series), 216-217, 220-221, 229, 245246; Qaggig, 20, 216-217, 221; Saputi, 216-217 Image: absent, 31, 42-43; access to his torical images, 35-37, 65-67,109; in Bergson, 40, 73; cliched , 34, 46, 53; crystal, 65, 68; dialectical, 51, 88, 97; haptic, 2, 51,155,162-164,168169,172,177-178,180,183-188,192; incompossible, 30, 54; and memory, 31, 50-51, 57,172; multisenso ry, xi, 71, 73,146-147, i53> 159,172, 210223; optical, 30, 40, 46 -5 0, 53 -54, 63, 76,131,162-168,172,177,186,192, 212; and stillness/paralysis, 29, 41-43, 59-60, 72. See also Affection-image; Audiovisual media; Movement-
Island of Flowers, 98 image; Recollection-image; Tim eimage; Virtual image; Vision/visualit y Island with Striped Sky, The, 178-179 Imagining Indians, 25,102-104,123
Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You?, 136 "Imperfect cinema," 6,10 Itam Hakim Hopiit, 134,182 In and Out of Africa, 101-102,123 Incompossibility: of cultural discourses, Itami, Juzo: Tampopo, 212 Iversen, Margaret, 167 83; incompo ssible images, 30, 54 / Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Independent Television Service, 14 Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed Indexicality, 92-93,110,112-113,142, 253 n6; and cinematic images, 124; Inside, 156-159,160, 232
and documentary, 93,125; and fossil, 84, 92; and photograph, 84, 86, 92; and smell, 113-114 India Hearts Beat, 169
Ineak, Leetia, 16 Instant Dread, 224 Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories, 197-198, 201
Jacobs, Ken, 61 Jafa, Arthur (A. J. Fielder), 200, 215; Slowly, This, 215-216 Jaguar, 100-101 James, Donna: Maigre Dog, 226-227
James, Henry, 223 Jarman, Derek, 213
Jembe, 182 Intercessor, 68-70,151 Jenik, Adriene: What's the Difference Interculturalaudience/spectatorship, 19-21,153 Between a Yam and a Sweet Potato?, Intercultural cinema, xii, xv, 1-13, 24227 25, 28-31, 6 3-64, 68,110,193; and Joamie, Philip, 16 critique of visuality, 131,133,136-138, Johnson, Avril, 36. See also Black 151-153; and cultural/political trans Audio Film Collective formation, xii, 67,195; and Deleuze, Johnson, Lorna, 18 26; as documentary and fiction, 66, Jones, Philip Mallory: and "African sen69, 93; as emergent, xiv, 2,1 0,1 3, sorium," 216; First World Order, 182, 29; as experimental, 1,18, 62; and 216; Jembe, 182; Wassa, 182 fetishism, 85; funding of, 13-16,116; Julien, Isaac, 10,12; The Attendant, as haptic, 177,193; infrastructure 251 ns ; Frantz Fanon: White Skin, of, 13-19; and memory, xiv, 1-2,12 Black Masks, 251 ns ; Looking for 13, 21, 51, 60, 62, 70-71, 74,129,153, Langston, 25, 75,134; The Passion of 195-196,198, 229, 231, 234-235; and Remembrance, 12, 25,134. See also mimetic technologies, 215 {see also Sankofa Cinema: as mimetic); produ ctio n and distribution, 16-18; and recollection- Kaige, Chen, 231 objects, 81; and senses, xiii, 195-196, Kama Sutra, 3, 232 209, 231, 234-2 35, 239, 241-242; a nd Kandinsky, Wassily, 213 sound, xvi Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, Intercultural movement/displacement, 25,33 78-79, 96-98,114,199-200; and Kant, Immanuel, 257 n7 fetish, 80; and transnational objects, Kayapo: Out of the Forest, The, 253 n8 78 Kew, Karen: Chasing the Dragon, 236 Interstitial cinema, 6 Khanjian, Arsinee, 39 Intersubjectivity, 183 Khlat, Yasmine: Leylouna notre nuit, Intolerance, 212 107,158-159 Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, 16 Khleifl, Michel, 7; Ma'loul fete sa Irigaray, Luce, 149,184 destruction, 54-55
292
o pH
Khush, 251 ns Kibbins, Gary: Finagnon, 83 Kim, Richard: By the Thinnest Root, 236 Kipanik, Mosesie, 16 Kippinguijautiit, 16 Kitchen Blues, The, 224 Kopytoff, Igor, 95 Kore. See "Blindness Series" Kramrisch, Stella, 161 Krishna, Srinivas: Lulu, 3,15; Masala, 3 Kubelka, Peter: Unsere Afrikareise, 134 Kunuk, Zacharias. See Igloolik Isuma Productions Kureishi, Hanif: My Beautiful Laun drette, 3; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 3 Kwan, Paul: Anatomy of a Spring Roll, 235 Lacan, Jacques, 151,193 Lant, Antonia, 166,171 Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah, 54,134 Last Angel of History, The, 89 Lebanon: Bits and Pieces, 107 Leder, Drew, 132 Lee, Ang: Eat Drink Man Woman, 212, 235 Lee, Helen, 17 Lee, Spike: Malcolm X, 67 Leibniz, 26; and incompossible images, 30.54 Leiris, Michel, 122 Lejeira, Jacinto, 171 Leung, Simon, 209 Levinas, Emmanuel, 63,184,191, 256 n2o Leylouna notre nuit, 107,158-159 Like Water for Chocolate, 212 Lingis, Alphonso, 255 nil Longboy, Zachery: water into fire, 74 Looking for Langston, 25, 75,134 Lorde, Audre, 209 Love, Women and Flowers, 97-98,120, 201
Lulu, 3,15 Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet, 25, 31, 34-36, 43-46, 50, 54, 56, 64-65,
72, 74-76
MacDougall, David, 52-53, 68
Madame Veau, 100-101, 253 n8 Maigre Dog, 226-227 Maitres fous, Les, 100-101 Makkik, Blandina, 16 Malcolm X, 67 Malcolm X, 67 Ma, Ming-Yuen S.: Aura, 172; Slanted Vision, 172; Sniff, 172-173 Ma'loulfete sa destruction, 54-55 Marker, Chris, 35; Sans soleil, 134,172, 177 Marx, Karl, 80-81, 87, 95,121,139, 258 nio Marxism, 51, 98; and Benjamin, 80-81, 86,121; and commodity, 95, 96; and fetish, 80, 86, 88, 95; and the senses, 144,207 Masala, 3 Masayesva, Victor, Jr., 19,188; Hopiit, 134,182; Imagining Indians, 25,102104,123; Itam Hakim Hopiit, 134,182; Ritual Clowns, 25,134; Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms, 25, 37, 75, 78,182, 218-220
Materiality: as source of meaning, 79-80, 84-86, 92, 94, 97,104,119122,129,168, 171, 253 n6. See also Mimesis Mathison, Trevor, 48 Mauss, Marcel, 95, 207-209 McCullough, Barbara: Water Ritual #1: An Urban Site of Purification, 251115
McLuhan, Marshall, 176 Measures of Distance, xi, 43,11 3,153156,177,187-188,190, 232, 237 Melodrama, 249 ni Memories from the Department of Amnesia, 25 Memory, 77, 83, 95, 194 -19 5, 243; in Benjamin, 64; in Bergson, 63-64,142, 146-147; collective/social, 24, 26, 62, 64, 73, 77,199; countermemory, 12; cultural, 22, 27,195; as embodied, 73, 76,142,146-147,152,157,159, 200, 202, 207, 228-229; and fetish, 86,177, 201, 253 n6; as fossil, 63; and image, 31, 50-51, 57,172; and
intercultural cinema, 48-55, 60, 62, 70-71 ,153 ,195- 196,1 98, 229, 231; in
Multiculturalism, 2-3, 6-9, 24, 249 ni Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal, 25,
Merleau-Ponty, 148-149; as mine field, 63,152; as multisensory, 22, 71-73; and nostalgia, 156, 201, 223;
57-58,134-135 My Beautiful Laundrette, 3 My Mother's Place, 25
personal/private, 24, 31, 41, 47, 51, 60; pure memory, 64, 73; and the
Mysteries of July, 25, 74,196-197
senses , xi, 22, 26, 84, 110-114,122, 130,194-203, 223, 229-231, 237-238;
Naficy, Hamid, xiv, 7,10, 27, 66,111,156,
and smell, 110-111,147-148, 205206, 214, 222-223; tactile, 112-113, 129-130,1 48-149,15 3, 256 n2; and taste, 110; and translation, 117-118; and trauma, 5, 64,152; voluntary/ involuntary, 64
Memory/all echo, 25 Mercer, Kobena, xiv, 10,12 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: and memory, 148-149; and mimesis, 144-145,148149, 214, 257 n7; and perception, 148-150,152. See also Phenome nology "Mestizo" (cinema), 6, 249 ni Meta Mayan II, 177 Metz, Christian, 210-211 Michaels, Eric, 252114 Michael X (Michael DeFreitas), 32, 36, 47, 67, 74
Mimesis, 138-145, 214, 222, 255 n6; in Auerbach, 138, 257 n7; in Benjamin, 138,140-143, 214, 257 n7; in BuckMorss, 143; and cinema, xvii, 22, 145,151,164,190,196, 214-215, 220221; in Horkheimer and Adorno, 139-140,143; in Merleau-Ponty, 144145,148-149, 214, 257 n7; mimetic technologies, 215-221; in Taussig, 142-143 Minghella, Anthony: The English Patient, 177, 231 Mirror stage, 187 Missing Lebanese Wars, 107-109, 232 Mississippi Masala, 3 Mootoo, Shani, xv; Her Sweetness Lingers, 148,185-188 Morris, William, 139 Morse, Margaret, 206 Mourning. See Ritual Movement-image, 27, 36, 42, 213
231 Nair, Mira, 3; Kama Sutra, 3, 232;
Mississippi Masala, 3; The Perez Family, 3 Nakkas, Olga: Lebanon: Bits and Pieces, 107 Narrative, xiii, 26, 30,158-159,163,187, 199, 215, 253 n6; identification, 170171,198, 213. See also Storytelling National Endowment for the Arts, 14 National Film Board of Canada, 13 Neurophysiology, 22, 202-206 New View/New Eyes, 177-178 Nichols, Bill, 10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 26 Nomad aesthetics, 11, 215-216; "nomad art," 168 "Non-places," 244 -24 7 Nostalgia. See Memory: and nostalgia Nunaqpa, 216 Nunavut (television series), 216-217, 220-221, 229, 245-246 Nurudin, Azian: Bitter Strength: Sadis tic Response Version, 176; Sinar Durjana, 176 Object: anthropomorphic, 93; auratic, 80-81, 94,101,120-122,124; as com modity, 95-96, 99,101,106; "dumb objects," 120; fetish, 21, 26; radio active, 79; recollection-object, 77, 81-84, 88, 97,101,110 ,122,176; tran sitional, 78,123-124; transnational, 77~79> 97, 104-105,110,120,123 Obomsawin, Alanis, 17; Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, 25, 33
Ocularis: Eye Surrogates. See "Blind ness Series" Odorama, 131,196, 212 Ong, Walter, 206, 223 Onodera, Midi: Skin Deep, 15
Ontario Film Development Corpora tion, 14 Onwurah, Ngozi, 10; And Still I Rise, 209-210 Operculum. See "Blindness Series" Optical: image [see Image: optical); vision/visuality, xii, 129,162-166, 170-171,176,182,184-185,187,190, 256 n22 O'Rourke, Dennis: Cannibal Tours, 101; The Good Woman of Bangkok,
252 m Pagnol, Marcel: Angele, 2.12. Paik, Nam June, 200 Papapapd, 99-100 Paris Match, 99,104
Parmar, Pratibha, 10; Khush, 251 n s; Sari Red, 251 n5
Pasolini, Pier Paolo: Arabian Nights, 56, 232 Passion of Remembrance,
Pickpocket, 171
Pietz, William, 21, 86 -8 8, 91,102,119, 122-125 Pinard, Sylvain, 161 Pisters, Patricia, 94 Pixelvision, 176 Polyester, 212, 245
Pornography, 151, 234, 258 n io Portillo, Lourdes: El Diablo Nunca Duerma, 15
Postcolonialism, xiii, 1, 8, 27, 90-91, 96, 116,123; in Africa, 46; Phi lipp ines , 32; postcolonial filmmakers/cinema, 56-57, 79. See also Colonialism Postmodernism, 27,174 Proust, Marcel, 64, 77, 83,130,147, 235, 251114 Psychoanalysis, 133,184,188,197, 249 ni, 254 n2, 255 nio, 256 n22; and fetish, 80, 86,151. See also Bal; Freud; Irigaray; Lacan; Silverman
The, 12, 25,
134 Pattunguyak, Barney, 16 Paz, Octavio: "El Mismo Tiempo," 180 Peck, Raoul, 29, 67; Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet, 25, 31, 34-36,
43- 46, 50, 54, 56, 64 -6 5, 72, 74-76 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 26,139, 2 54255 n4, 255 ng Pels, Peter, 121 People and the Land, 56
Perception: in Bergson, 41-42, 48, 6264,146-147,150,152, 202; and cul ture, 145,194-195; in Deleuze, 61-62; embodied, xii-xiii, 22,132,145-153, 169-17 2,188 -190,19 3, 211, 213-215; gaseous, 61; in Merleau-Ponty, 148150,152; plasticity of, 146-147,152, 201-206; as subtractive, 41-42,152
Qaggig, 216-217, 221
Qigong, 152 Quartier Mozart, 99
Queer (cinema), 4; audience, 20 Quilitalik, Paulossie. See Igloolik Isuma Productions Ra'ad, Walid, 37, 59,125; Missing Leban ese Wars, 107-109, 232; Secrets in the Open Sea, 109-110; Talaeen a Junuub, 25, 65, 68-6 9,1 09,1 35, 232
Radioactivity, 65,12 2; of fossils, 51, 70, 81, 84, 91,124, 247; of objects, 79 Re'.Assemblage, 134,164,177
Recollection-image, 37, 50, 53-54 Recollection-object, 77, 80-84, 88, 97, 101,110,122,176 Reid-Pfarr, Robert, 67
Perez Family, The, 3 Perfumed Nightmare, The, 69-70 Petit a petit, 100
Reinke, Steve: Instructions for Recover ing Forgotten Childhood Memories,
Phenomenology, xiii, 145-153,188; cri tique of, 150,152. See also MerleauPonty Photographs: as fetishistic, 86; as indexical, 84, 86, 92
Resnais, Alain: Hiroshima mon amour,
Piano, The, 172
197-198, 201 134 Ricci-Lucci , Angela, 212 Riegl, Alois, 171,1 84-185, 257 n7; and figurative representation, 165167; and haptic/optical, 131,162-
169; and Hildebrand, 164-165; and space/spatiality, 164-166,171; and Worringer, 164-165 Riggs, Marlon: Black Is, Black Ain't, 110, 225 Ritual, 101-102,196, 251 ns; in Beharry, 112,115,118; ceremonial body, 7374; of cooking, 110, 226-227, 234 -235; and mou rnin g, 5, 25, 74-7 6,19 2, 251 ns; ritual object, 96 Ritual Clowns, 25,134 Rivera, Alex: Animaquiladora, 252 ni ; Papapapd, 99-100 Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video Fellowship, 15 Rodaway, Paul, 244 Rodowick, D. R , 54, 255 n8 Rodriguez, Marta: Love, Women and Flowers, 97-98,120, 201 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 28 Rosch, Eleanor, 202-203 Rossellini, Roberto, 27 Rouch, Jean, 68; Jaguar, 100-101; Ma dame Veau, 100-101, 253 n8; Les Maitres fous, 100-101; Petit a petit, 100
Rushdie, Salman, 250 n6 Saar, 227 Saddam Speaks, 56
Said, Edward, 85 Sallo um, Jayce, 4, 37; Muqaddimah Li Nihayat Jidal, 25, 57-58,134-135; Talaeen afunuub, 25, 65, 68- 69, 109 , 135, 232; This Is Not Beirut, 58-59, 135 Salt Mines, The, 252 ni Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, 3 Sankofa, 16,134-135. See also Julien Sankofa, 3,15 Sans soleil, 134,172,177 Saputi, 216-217 Sari Red, 251 ns
Scarry, Elai ne, 200 Scent of Green Papaya, The, 222-223
Schab, Frank R., 205 Schor, Naomi, 169-170 Science fiction, 257 ns Scorsese, Martin: Casino, 177
"Screen theory," 184 Search for Peking Dog, The, 236 Secrets in the Open Sea, 109 Seeable vs. sayable. See Foucault Seeing Is Believing, xi, 22, 75, 78, 90,
112-113,115-118,120,124,127-129, 153,160-161,187-188, 201, 237 Semiotic film theory, 94,104,145-146, 171,184, 255 ng Senses: anthropology of, 159-161, 206209, 240; and culture, 2, 22-23, i47~ 148,152,159-161,164-165,195-208, 213, 215, 229-230 [see also Senso rium: cultural); distance senses, 119,132,146,148, 211, 221 [see also Vision; Hearing); and excess, 249 ni; hierarchy of/configuration of, 22, 119,132-133,199, 201-203, 211, 239, 241; and intercultural cinema, xiii, 195-196, 209, 231, 234, 239, 241-242; and knowledge, 144-145,194-195, 204, 231, 238-241; and memory, xi, 22, 26, 84,110-114, i 2 2 .130* 194203, 229-231, 237-238; memory and ambivalence, 229-238; neurophysiology of, 202, 204-206; sense envy, 239-240; "the sensible," 31, 73,111; "sensual abandon," 118-119; sensuous geography, 2,159, 209, 218, 229-232, 245-247; sens uou s similarity, 140, 168. See also Audiovisual media: and expressibility of nonaudiovisual senses; Smell; Sound; Tactility/touch; Taste; Vision/visuality Sensorium, 2, 23,111,132,153,188, 242; "African sensorium," 182, 216, 226; of the commod ity, 245; cult ural , 2, 22,196-199, 203, 206-209,215-216, 230, 243; Indian, 161; modern, 132; po rt ab le, 243-24 7; West ern, 241 Seremeta kis, C. Nadia, 84, 95, 200-201, 207-208 Seven Songs for Malcolm X, 25, 67 Sewraj, Yudi: A Box of His Own, 233234 Shaviro, Steven, 145,151,184, 255 nil Shoah, 54,134 Shohat, Ella, 6 Shoot for the Contents, 134
Silva, Jorge: Love, Women and Flowers,
97-98,120, 201 Silverman, Kaja, 255 nio Sinar Durjana, 176 Sinclair, Ed: Chasing the Dragon, 236 Singer, Bryan: The Usual Suspects,
177 Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms, 25, 37, 75, 78,182, 218-220 Skin Deep, 15 Slanted Vision, 172 Slowly, This, 215-216
Smell, xvi, xvii, 2,117,119,123-124 ,139, 159-160, 210-213, 231, 233, 240-241, 244-246, 256 ni, 258 mi; "aroma of the commodity," 244-245; biology of, 203-206; as indexical, 113-114; and memory, 110-111,147-148, 205-206, 214, 222-223, 243; Odorama, 131,196, 212
Smoke Signals, 15 Sniff, YJZ-YJ$
Snow, Michael, 61 Sobchack, Vivian, 149-151,193; and volitional vision, 183 Solana s, Fernan do, 10, 249 n i , 257 n8 Soun d, xv -xv i, 172, 244; hap tic , xvi, m
Who Needs a Heart?, 48, 72, 74. See also Audiovisual 182-183;
media Space/spatiality: haptic, 166; of no mad ic expe rienc e, 215; in Riegl, 164-166,171 Species in Danger Ed, 177
Spectatorship, 53-54, 62,118-119, 211213, 230-232; "authenticating audi ence," 21; embodie d [see Perception: embodied); female, 188; intercultural, 19-21,153; participatory, 48,147; as sensory translation, 153. See also Identification; Vision/visuality "Spiritual automaton," 251 ni Spivak, Gayatri C, 253 ns Splash, 251 ns
Stallybrass, Peter, 87 Stam, Robert, 6 Stange, Maren, 93, 253 nil Stewart, Susan, 253 n6 Stoddart , D. Michae l, 258 m i
Stoller, Paul, 153, 207-208 Storytelling, 70,122,129. See also Narrativ e Strange Days, 257 ns Strawberry Fields, 15
Studlar, Gaylyn, 256 n22 Sujir, Leila: India Hearts Beat, 169 Suleiman, Elia, 5,17, 29, 73; Chronicle
of a Disappearance, 15, 25, 60; Homage by Assassination, 25, 59- 60, 75; Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal,
25, 57-58,134-135 Super Shamou, 16 Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 34,
134 Syed, Alia: Fatima's Letter, 254 ni3 Synaesthesia, 22, 213-214, 221-223 Tactility/touch, xvi, xvii, 2, 22,118-119, 124,146,159,160,162,193, 204, 231; in Berenso n, 165; and digital simul a tion, 131; and film/video, xii, 76,175; and knowledge/epistemology, 132, 138-141,143,159,190-193, 224; and memory, 22,112-113,127-130,148!49» !53> 256 n2; in Riegl, 165; tactile image/visuality, 22,127-129,151,168170,181,184,186,192; and visual art, 165. See also Haptic: visuality Tahimik, Badlat: The Perfumed Night mare, 69-70, 99
Tajiri, Rea, 4,17, 29, 67, 73,110,125; History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, xi, 25, 31, 32-33, 42-4 3. 50, 56, 64 -6 5, 70, 72, 75-76, 78, 8283,106-107,112,124,130; Strawberry Fields, 15 Takuginai, 16 Talaeen ajunuub, 25, 65, 68 -6 9, 109,
135,232 Tale of Love, A, 56 Tampopo, 212 Tanaka, Janice, 4; Memories from the Department of Amnesia, 25; Who's Gonna Pay for These Donuts Any way?, 25
Taste, xvi, 2,197-198, 200-204, 231, 233, 243; food/cooking, 110,161, 211-213, 224-227, 229, 234-238, 246-247
Taussig, Michael, 191; and mimesis, 142-143 Taylor, Lucien: In and Out of Africa, 101-102,123
Telefilm Canada, 14 Television, 17,19 Temple of the Fetus, The, 252 ni Testament, 25,134
Textiles, 168-169,175 Theiler, Kim Su: Great Girl, 110,120 Thiohbiano, Hous tapha , 182 "Third Aesthetics," 216 Third Cinema, 6,11, 62, 249 ni "Third World," 6, 96, 98, 232, 249 ni, 254 ni2; artifacts, 123 Third World Newsreel, 10,16; and "D'Ghetto Eyes," 18 This Is Not Beirut, 58-59,135 Thomas, Nicholas, 95-96 Thompson, Evan, 202-203 Through the Milky Way, 25 Tiedemann, Rolf, 121 Time-image, xiv, 27-28, 42,129 ,131, 163 Tom, Pam: Two Lies, 136-137 Torossian, Garine, 62,1 75; Drowning in Flames, 174; Girl from Moush, 174; Visions, 174 Touch. See Tactility/touch Toufic, Jalal, 50-51, 54, 232; Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green,
57,107,135, 232 Trained Chinese Tongue, The, 236-238
"Trade Routes" (exhibition), 253 n i l Tran Anh Hung, 160; The Scent of Green Papaya, 222-223 Transitional object, 78,123-124 Translation, 115-116,199; and mem ory, 117-118; partial, 37-39; of sense knowled ge, 153, 240 Transnational cinema, 6-7, 78, 249 ni Transnational economy/capital, 9, 96-97, 244-247 Transnational object, 77-79, 97,104105,110,120,123
Tran T. Kim-Trang: "Blindness Series," 137-138 Trinh T. Minh-ha, xiv, 7,11, 37, 68, 85, 137,191; Re:Assemblage, 134,164,
177; Shoot for the Contents, 134; Sur name Viet Given Name Nam, 34,134; A Tale of Love, 3, 5 Trippi, Laura, 114,117, 253 nil Truly, Ruby: . . . And the Word Was God, 220 Twilight City, 25,134 Two Lies, 136-137 Un Chien Delicieux, 177 Underexposed: The Temple of the Fetus, 252 ni Unsere Afrikareise, 134 Usual Suspects, The, 177
Valdovino, Luis: Work in Progress, 252 m Valery, Paul, 81 Varela, Francisco J., 202-203 Velez, Edin: Meta Mayan II, 177 Vertov, Dziga, 171 Video, 5-6, 76, 79, 97,16 0,191 , 256 ni 8; deterioration of, 172,175-176; haptic, 76,159,168,171-173* 175-176 Video Letters, 176 Vintage: Families of Value, 15 Viola, Bill: Chott el-Djerid, 178 Virtual image, 40-41, 51-52 Vision/visuality, 76; critique of, 131137,151-152,160-161,191,193, 254 n2; embodi ed (see Perception: em bod ie d); haptic, xi-xii, xiv, 22,127129,151,162-171,175-176,181-193, 256 n22; limits of, xii, 76,196,198; ocularcentrism/valuation of vision, 114,117,119,132-133,136,144,148149,194,199, 209, 230, 241, 244; optical, xii, 129,162-166,170-171, 176,182,184-185,187,190, 256 n22; the seeable and the sayable, 3031, 36,111; volition al, 183. See also Audiovisual media; Spectatorship Visions, 174 Visual art (Western), 164-169, 208 Vitiello, Steven, 180 Voice-over, xv, 36, 43, 81-82,113 Voyeurism, 177,184, 258 nio Wassa, 182
297
0 CD
X
298
pn
water into fire, 74 Watermelon Woman, The, 25, 65 Water Ritual #1: An Urban Site of Purification, 251115 Waters, John: Polyester, 212, 245 Way to My Father's Village, The, 25, 75
Weiner, Annette, 95 Weinstein, Jeff, 194, 234-235, 238 Wen, Laurie: The Trained Chinese
Tongue, 236-238
Wharton, Edith, 223 What's the Difference Between a Yam and a Sweet Potato?, 227
Whit e, Allon, 87 Whitman, Walt, 26 Who Needs a Heart?, 25, 31-32, 36-37, 47, 68, 71, 76,134, 200; sound in, 48,
72,74 Who's Gonna Pay for These Donuts Anyway?, 25 Wilkinson, Dawn: Instant Dread, 224
Williams, Li nda, 151, 254 n2 Williams, Selina: Saar, 227 Winnicott, D. W: and transitional object, 78,123-124 Woman Being in Asia, A, 1^1 n i Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls, 104-106,120, 237 Wong, Paul, 4; Chinaman's Peak: Walk ing the Mountain, 74 Work in Progress, 252 ni
Worringer, Wilhelm. See Riegl Writing (as technology), 214-215, 220221
Xie Fei: Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls, 104-106,120, 237
Young, Robert: Alambrista, 252 n i Youngblood, Gene, 256 ni8 "Zone of indetermination," 147, 202
